The Beginning

This blog is for my own use, but I'll try to make it intelligible for anyone else who happens to stumble across it.

You could say that I collect people's lives. My collection actually consists of the things people leave behind - diaries, letters, photos, scrapbooks - with which they document their everyday existence. I call this domestic history. I enjoy tracing these folks through Google and Ancestry.com, and would eventually like to document these things online in blogs or websites. Right now my collection consists of the following:

• A scrapbook kept by Martha Ballard, a young girl living in Lynn, Massachusetts during World War II. I found this in a second hand shop, and because I have family from Lynn, it had personal interest, as well as just being fun to look through. It includes photos, newspaper clippings, greeting cards, school and 4-H items.
• Diaries of Sarah Ellen "Nellie" Blake, a young lady from Providence, Rhode Island. They start in 1890, the year she graduated from high school, and end the day before her wedding in 1893 to Selwyn Blake, who I believe was her cousin. I have done quite a bit of research on their family history. Selwyn was fairly easy to track because he had an unusual first name. (Parents - please give your children unusual names that are easy to spell. It will make life so much simpler for the historians and genealogists of the future.) Selwyn ran into some legal trouble during his career, but I'm not sure at this point if he was ethically challenged or just very unlucky. These diaries were what really got me interested in researching domestic history.
• Several identified photos from Philadelphia, dating to about 1870. One of them is of Amos B. Sayres, an African-American man who was employed by the U.S. Mint. I have been able to find many of the people in the photos in the U.S. Census.
• Childhood items belonging to Elaine Dee Wolf of Cincinnati, Ohio. These include a letter she wrote to Santa Claus in 1908 when she was six years old; several pages from her baby book that include photos of her and her family; a couple of other letters; and the program from her graduation from Vassar in 1922. Elaine appears to have had a happy life as the only child of well-to-do parents, and traveled to Europe several times in her life.
• Items belonging to the Miller family of Fairfield and Bridgeport, CT. These include a letter and a few postcards, and many photos that are only identified by first name. Not sure yet if there is enough here to do anything with it. And the stuff dates up to the 1960s, so research will be more difficult (no census records available) and there may be privacy concerns as well. Rather than documenting the stuff, I may try to find them and see if they want any of these things back.
• Books and other personal items belonging to H. Morse Bond of Brattleboro, Vermont. There are a couple of diaries kept by a woman that he lived with when he was a young man in the 1920s - her name is not in them, but it doesn't appear that she was his mother - but the fact that he inherited them and kept them indicates that she was probably a relative. I just got these and haven't finished reading through them yet. So I'm not sure if I'm researching him, or her, or both of them. The diaries are mostly concerned with the weather, who came to call, baking she did, and where they went that day. Several entries from 1924 document the illness of her husband, Henry, from "stoppage of the kidneys." He apparently didn't survive, so if I can find an obituary that should help identify her. Mr. Bond is not listed in the 1920 census. The 1930 census lists him as a World War veteran, so he may have still been in the military in 1920.

The one that got away: At the same time that I acquired Nellie Blake's diaries, I got a journal kept by Alison Tuttle, a young man from Farmington, NH. The journal documents a train trip he took in 1880 with his father out west. I think they got as far as Nebraska. I believe the father was looking to purchase some land. Because I didn't realize at the time that I was collecting these things, I sold it on eBay. But before doing so, I did some research online. Again, it was helpful that he had an unusual (for a man, anyway) first name. In the journal he mentions working as a teacher, but is looking out for some more exciting career. Evidently he abandoned that idea and settled down, because he later became Superintendent of Schools in Keene, NH.

So that's my collection up to now. It just occurred to me that perhaps I should get a fireproof box for these things, instead of having them scattered around the house.

If you collect people's lives, write and tell me about it. Thanks for reading.