Journals and diaries

Like so many young girls, I had one of those pretty cardboard bound books with a padlock and key. Where I could write my "secrets." I think I was about 10 or 11 when I had my first diary. Most of the times I was hard pressed to write a paragraph about what happened in my day. It seemed so mundane. But I did keep diaries, loads of diaries, until I was 20 years old. And a schizophrenic friend of mine found my (unlocked) diary and read some things I didn't want anyone to read. And challenged me on it. After she left that night, I burned that particular diary and threw the rest out.

After that, I would keep records from time to time. I have a box of those books and they have no rhyme and reason to them. In fact, I read a few pages this week. I wonder whether to keep them--they don't really hold any clues for ME but maybe someday they might for my daughter and/or my grandchildren. 

My diaries aren't as interesting as someone like Pepys or Queen Victoria. I rarely recorded the things that were going on outside of my small circle of life. More interesting in the past few years have been my photographs. They chronicle my life and travels--things that are important to me like family and family history. I continue to work on building a published blog that will actually "show" my family and friends what I hold dear and where I came from.

My forebears left no written records behind. My mother took photographs but, maddeningly, she didn't note why she took the photos she did. Who the people were. I would have loved to have known what she thought, what she held dear. I would have loved to have known why my grandparents chose to leave Ireland, England and Scotland. Oh, yes, it was probably for a better life but how did they FEEL, who were their parents and did they ever correspond with them? I have three precious letters written by a great uncle to his wife and baby daughter in the closing days of WWI, bare weeks before he himself died before Armistice. They give a glimpse of what my paternal family may have been like. 

I hope that my grandchildren won't have to wonder. I hope that I will leave an adequate record--in my photos, in my blogs--of who their grandmother was. What was important to her and why. That is what I would find valuable about journals and diaries and it is because of their absence in MY life that drives me in my own records.