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thenerdygirl) wrote2021-03-03 09:36 am
thenerdygirl) wrote2021-03-03 09:36 am
1890 journal
Last March I signed up for an extra work project from our Archives department and I was assigned a side project of transcribing a diary from 1890 set in rural Newfoundland with an unknown author. It was just something to work on whenever there was nothing from my regular acquisition workload to do. Unfortunately, it got pushed to the back of my project list because my acquisitions work actually became busier since the pandemic began because my individual work focuses on electronic books. As you can imagine, in the remote learning world we live in now, EBooks have gotten to be very, very popular with faculty and students.
However yesterday I finally got to get back at the transcribing project and remembered just how intriguing the journal is. The unknown author is a woman who seems to be somewhat young, it sounds like she's not married yet, and she's originally from St. John's (our capital). So it's not clear why she's living in the rural area of Three Arms when she's not married, I'm thinking perhaps her family sent her to live with relatives to help them out in this rural area.
She writes a lot about her uncles and aunts as well as the visitors they receive, a man named Jack that she kissed and who is a fisherman she's only seen six times the year so far. She writes often about the weather, recording the winds nearly every entry which reminds me so much of my Dad who knew the wind direction every day. It makes sense, the weather & the wind impact fishing and travelling by water that's a huge part of their day-to-day lives.
It's said locally that one thing Newfoundlanders love to talk about is the weather and I think that is very true. Weather talk is not simply small talk here, it can be a full-on conversation. Though I think that this is true for any place that has large fishing or farming or any industries reliant on the weather.
Anyway, getting away from the point. My point is that it's been really enjoyable working on this slice of life journal and I wanted to share it. I hope in transcribing I can help the library find some clues to her identity, I'm interested in knowing what happened to her and how this journal ended up surviving the years.
However yesterday I finally got to get back at the transcribing project and remembered just how intriguing the journal is. The unknown author is a woman who seems to be somewhat young, it sounds like she's not married yet, and she's originally from St. John's (our capital). So it's not clear why she's living in the rural area of Three Arms when she's not married, I'm thinking perhaps her family sent her to live with relatives to help them out in this rural area.
She writes a lot about her uncles and aunts as well as the visitors they receive, a man named Jack that she kissed and who is a fisherman she's only seen six times the year so far. She writes often about the weather, recording the winds nearly every entry which reminds me so much of my Dad who knew the wind direction every day. It makes sense, the weather & the wind impact fishing and travelling by water that's a huge part of their day-to-day lives.
It's said locally that one thing Newfoundlanders love to talk about is the weather and I think that is very true. Weather talk is not simply small talk here, it can be a full-on conversation. Though I think that this is true for any place that has large fishing or farming or any industries reliant on the weather.
Anyway, getting away from the point. My point is that it's been really enjoyable working on this slice of life journal and I wanted to share it. I hope in transcribing I can help the library find some clues to her identity, I'm interested in knowing what happened to her and how this journal ended up surviving the years.
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