The gift of a family member’s 1884 diaries lead University of Guelph history professor Dr. Catherine Wilson to embark on an ambitious project.
Wilson created a Rural Diary Archive that preserves the pre-1900 history of rural life in Ontario.
“I was thrilled to receive the diaries of my great grandmother Lucy Middagh from the late 1800s,” Wilson said.
“Sharing the diaries with my students was an interesting process as they struggled with the hand writing and vocabulary. The crumbling books with faded writing needed to be transcribed and digitalized.”
Wilson gave a presentation on True Stories of Love and Loss – The Rural Diaries to members and guests of the Mapleton Historical Society at the Drayton United Church on Nov. 7.
Wilson said she found students were brilliant with technology but not so successful with cursive writing.
With assistance from the Francis and Ruth Redelmeier Professorship in Rural History, Wilson and her students began the process of placing the diaries of the past onto a website. Diaries donated to the program come from a variety of diarists including a Goderich cigar maker, a hunter from Glengarry and an Essex tobacco farmer.
Diaries come in many different forms and no two diaries are the same. The lock and key type used to record dating, dancing and social functions by young girls are usually filled with love and humour.
Others reveal the end of the diary and life itself when the hand writing turns shaky or another member of the family takes over the writing. Most entries start with an explanation of the weather as the weather usually dictated how the day proceeded. Diaries were recorded by people of all ethnic backgrounds, including the Metis, Irish, English and Scottish.
“The Mennonites and Quakers surprised me with the large amount of diaries that they kept,” Wilson said.
“Very few Catholic diaries have been found. The Methodist and Presbyterian faiths seemed to know how to read and write and usually ended the day’s writings with a reflection or a Bible verse. Many women with young children lacked the time or the education to compile a diary.”
As records of who a person was, diaries became valuable possessions. Farmers kept diaries of everyday life on the farm and used the recording to improve themselves the following year. Rural women kept records for their husbands. More rural men than urban men kept diaries. Urban women were thought to be too fashionable to keep diaries.
“The Buxton family of African American decent had each member of the family contribute for one year. This taught each family member how to keep records, making it similar to an apprenticeship,” Wilson said.
She also noted most diaries contained few mistakes and the calligraphy was meticulous. Some sentences were written by a doodler who drew the sentences in pictures instead of words. Designs on the front cover were a rarity. The books went from plain white pages being sectioned off, which perplexed many a writer.
“One example of cross hatching was displayed in a diary written by Susan Smith of Wellington County in 1874. She filled the page, turned the book on its side and continued writing over top of the entries already recorded,” Wilson said.
Diaries were also used to store papers for safekeeping and obituaries cut from Newspapers. They were rarely private and personal, although diary swapping was done between friends. Some diarists recorded monetary exchanges, labour sharing with neighbours, store purchases, grain sales and tales of family and the larger neighbourhood.
The earliest diary in the collection is that of Hannah Jarvis of Lincoln County, 1845. The University of Guelph is also in possession of Jarvis’ cookbook. One interesting 1884 dairy was that of Matilda Hill of Douglas Village, Wellington County. Hill was the daughter of a Belwood merchant who was employed in her father’s store. While working in the shop located in the centre of the village, Matilda was drawn into the drama of village life. Her diary entries tended to be gossipy and juicy but were not written on a daily basis.
Wilson accepts private donations of diaries up to the year 1900 at present. There are over 130 diaries currently in the collection.
Students access each diary after reading its contents and decide on its usefulness to the program. The diary is then digitalized by a graduate student and uploaded onto the website. A small number of volunteer transcribers from various locations in North America and Australia choose a diary from the website to transcribe. Some transcribe more than one diary.
A transcription box is provided on the website for translated words. Adding punctuation, correcting spelling errors or grammatical errors is not permitted. Each page is typed as it was written. Over 2,000 pages have been transcribed during a one-year period.
“Diaries are a valuable source of history that capture the rich texture of rural life. They can be compared to a novel, but diaries don’t follow a plot. The university has recently purchased a planetary scanner that moves around the diary scanning its contents, helping to preserve the diary,” Wilson said.
For information on the Rural Diary Archive or becoming a volunteer transcriber go to www.ruraldiaries.lib.uoguelph.ca.
