When my Great Great Grandmother, Minnie LeCraw, was 21 she kept a diary with brief daily entries chronicling life in rural Indiana of 1888. The diary has been passed down through the family and many people have read it to catch a glimpse of who she was and relive the adventures of a young school teacher. Her handwriting is beautiful. The book has a handsome leather cover. And her Victorian, one room school house setting is inviting. But the thing is.... it is really boring.
Each daily entry was no more than three sentences, often filled with abbreviations, initials, and mentions of mundane activities. You can quickly read an entire month of seemingly disconnected sentences. It begins to feel repetitive.
But I was convinced there was a compelling story in here. I wanted to experiment with a new approach at the narrative that would capture it. What follows are the three evolutions in content product concepts. So far the tangible output is not much better than an amateur blog. But the process has inspired me to imagine a very intriguing storytelling model.
Power of Daily Serials
As an avid reader of daily comic strips, a fan of old radio dramas and good television dramas, I recognize the potential of serialized content. When written well, this can be a great narrative device to make the audience wait between installments. So last year when I noticed that the 2012 calendar lined up with the 1888 calendar, with matching dates and days of the week, I decided to try blogging the diary one entry at a time, on the same "day" that it was written. So on Sunday, January 1, 2012 I published the following entry:
"Sunday, January 1. Watched the New Year in last night. Parted from F. at half past eight — reached Bethany about ten and taught Sunday School class as usual.
I helped entertain callers in the afternoon and attended service at Bethany church again at night. It has been a pleasant day, but I wished for one more hr. at home."
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| minnielecraw.wordpress.com |
Why did the serialization work? Because that is exactly how it was written. Minnie LeCraw sat down each day and wrote a page in her diary as a single, contained content unit.
Down the Rabbit Holes
The next step in the story was adding layers to the raw content. As I read and share the diary, I have two objectives. I want to learn something about the author and also get a glimpse into a historical time and place.
At its face value it is difficult to get a good image of Minnie LeCraw or life in 1888 Indiana just from the words she wrote. The diary entries are brief. There are many disconnected passing references to people and places that are meaningless to the reader. She was not writing this for an audience, presumably just herself or her family who would know the backstory of the people and activities she recorded. But for readers today it needs context. So I began to add content.
First I created four top-level pages that introduce Minnie and other characters that appear in the story and describe the locations and setting so that readers could enter the diary with some background.
These took some investigative work to determine who the 120 different people were that she mentions over nine months, often only by first name, and their relation to her and each other. She also visits at least 12 different locations throughout the year. I used genealogy sources, scanned historical books and records, local histories online, and the most valuable, scanned property maps from the 1870s and 1890s. These often included both biographical sketches of some prominent pioneer families of those counties as well as detailed township maps that I could cross-reference with current day Google maps. I was able to uncover who many of the people were and what the towns she lived in looked like at that time. In fact, the town where she boarded and taught school has long since vanished. Finding where Bethany of Parke County, Indiana was the first mystery I needed to solve. After hours of studying maps and old photos, when I drove through the town of Waveland for the first time ever this past July I felt as if I was visiting an old home.
Next I began to look closely at what she was saying. I realized there could be an interesting story in almost every sentence. When something caught my eye, I would do a little research and add a post script "Editor's Note" to the blog post providing a little background, links to additional information, and the occasional image if it was directly related to something described by Minnie. My added notes included biographical sketches of neighbors, explanations of school administration policies, descriptions of what everyday objects and events where in 1888, and analysis of historical and modern maps to pinpoint buildings and compare locations today. A seemingly straightforward sentence, upon further inspection, could almost always send me off on an illuminating research adventure.
- Who Was Minnie LeCraw?
- Meet the Other Characters
- Learn About the Locations in the Diary
- Indiana in 1888
These took some investigative work to determine who the 120 different people were that she mentions over nine months, often only by first name, and their relation to her and each other. She also visits at least 12 different locations throughout the year. I used genealogy sources, scanned historical books and records, local histories online, and the most valuable, scanned property maps from the 1870s and 1890s. These often included both biographical sketches of some prominent pioneer families of those counties as well as detailed township maps that I could cross-reference with current day Google maps. I was able to uncover who many of the people were and what the towns she lived in looked like at that time. In fact, the town where she boarded and taught school has long since vanished. Finding where Bethany of Parke County, Indiana was the first mystery I needed to solve. After hours of studying maps and old photos, when I drove through the town of Waveland for the first time ever this past July I felt as if I was visiting an old home.
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| Comparing historical and current maps |
One early instance was her sentence: "All day the low hung clouds have dropped their garnered fullness down." It sounded too poetic compared to other sentences, so after some digging online I found that it was likely a quote from a poem. This poem was only (as far as I could find) published in a 19th Century primer textbook, and only in the 5th edition. She probably used that textbook in her classroom. Google has scanned that edition so I could see the page of the actual book. Fascinating. In that process I caught a glimpse of Minnie and the past. But I'm not sure the words of an editor's note could quite capture it.
Examples of entries with editor's notes that were an experience just to research:
- February 16: Reading a Dickens book
- March 5: Traveling by train and handcar between small towns
- April 6: Distribution of one-room school houses and identifying a likely location of where Minnie taught.
- April 10: Going to the small town opera house
- April 23: Indiana State Normal School
- April 27: Getting a teaching license
- May 17: Trying to find out what meeting she attended in the county seat
- September 25: Visiting the future President
Parallel Narratives
The diary project as described above ended on October 1, with the final entry made by Minnie on that day in 1888. I added notes to more than a third of the daily entries. The overview pages have been expanded with research and analysis of people and places mentioned within the diary pages that I was able to piece together some of the story of her life. I determined that she boarded with the family of her older sister and that she had been living with them and moving across the state for several years since her parents had died. I now have a pretty good guess for where and when she met her future husband, my Great Great Grandfather, whom she was frequently writing letters to and traveling on trains to visit that year. Both of these facts were unknown to her grandchildren, who had originally shared the diary and their family notes with me.
While the daily format and the extra content layers made the diary a more interesting experience, it still doesn't tell the story I think it can. It doesn't even present the story that I personally experienced through poring over old maps, tracing her walking routes through fields or trips on old train lines, getting to know the people in her life, picturing the church gatherings, community events, and imagining who she was at that point in time. My understanding of what a young woman's life would have been like in rural Victorian Indiana was challenged and is now much richer.
But how can that story be told? Daily blog posts with extra links is a nice exercise, but it still does not capture the messages. I think there is a third step in evolving the story. I want to combine the compelling nature of the daily serial and the contextual layer of notes and links with the strong linear narrative of a book. I imagine parallel narratives that unfold together but at different levels. One that discusses the surprising and meaningful themes that her life illustrated that year, such as the independence and limits of women without families, the immersive role of the church within small towns, and the rhythm of life in that era. There is also a narrative that is essentially the story of a town--getting to know the people of 1888 Waveland, Indiana, visualizing the place, stepping back in time. And finally there is the narrative in Minnie's own words.
I admit I don't have this product figured out yet. It may be an ebook, an another type of website, an app, or some other new digital format that would allow for the appropriate pacing and depth of the stories. But regardless of what it is or when I get around to creating it, I am excited to tell this great story.
Final Thought
The purpose of even beginning this project was to capture the story of my Great Great Grandmother in a way that can be enjoyed and shared by my daughters, cousins, and family members that now spread across the globe. I debated publicly publishing someone's private diary, but the content is much more about journaling facts and events than recording personal thoughts. The strong, independent 21-year-old Minnie LeCraw in 1888 is a valuable story to capture and share with many.
