My ancestor’s journal is now a blog

As some readers of this blog may be aware, I’ve been engaged in a transcription project of sorts for the past few years. My great-great grandmother’s journal was typed up in the 1930’s and later xeroxed into many copies. I possess one of these xeroxed copies. I took the next modernization step and re-typed the journal into a Word document. As I’ve worked, I’ve occasionally posted excerpts from the journal as posts to this blog. Now I’ve made my ancestor’s journal into its own blog: The Journal of Emma Tilton Richards: 1888 to 1902.

If you want to start at the first entry, here is January 1, 1888. So far, I have all of the 1888 entries on the blog, and have started on 1889.

Emma lived in the town of Williamsburg, Massachusetts with her husband, Frank. At the start of the journal, they have five children and more children are born in subsequent years. Frank’s mother and stepfather also live with them.

The journal entries are usually very brief, and sometimes just consist of a report of the weather and the work that have been completed by the family for that day. But for me, I’ve found it a fascinating peek into that time and place.

I’ve added contextual notes to some entries, according to my own curiosity. One of my favorite discoveries was that Marion MacBride, one of Emma’s close female cousins, was a journalist based out of Boston and was active in all sorts of organizations.

I also have a page called “Cast of characters” which is an index to the names of people who appear in the journal. I don’t index the immediate family members and I don’t index people who are mentioned only once. I figure that some of the main visitors to the blog will be people conducting genealogical research and this page will hopefully help them find all the entries in which their relation is mentioned.

I’ve changed the template of the blog numerous times. I’m moderately satisfied with the current one and it’s free, so I suppose I can’t complain too much. In any case, I had decided that I would make the blog public and searchable once I had a full year posted and annotated. And that happened this weekend, so hooray! Thanks to all those who commented on the excerpts I shared, as that helped spur me to turning the journal into a blog of its own.