A few years ago, at Pepper’s family reunion, someone brought out a pair of boxes they’d found stashed in an attic somewhere. The boxes contained the journals of her grandfather, John. For over two decades, he wrote almost daily in personal journals about things happening in his life. Everyone had a good time looking through them to find the dates when they were born, then laughing about Grandpa John’s comments, which were typically things like “Cecil and Donna had another baby. A boy today.”
Although everyone thought the journals were cool, no one knew quite what to do with them. Stashing them back in an attic to gather dust seemed pointless, but there weren’t any volunteers willing to take and house them. After the reunion, I suspect they just went back to the attic.
Fast forward to this year, when we hosted the family reunion at our place. Once again, the topic of the journals came up. I suggested that someone scan them… that way, everyone could access them if they were curious, and they wouldn’t take up space. Everyone agreed. Then someone asked who would do it. Silence. Long, awkward silence. So I volunteered, and inherited the boxes. The journals have been in my office for a few months now, and I finally decided I should get cracking on this project.
Because the scanner will require the pages to be loose, I’ll need to disassemble the journals themselves. It’s kind of a tragedy, but then again, the whole point is to get rid of the physical items! I took a few photos of them before I started ripping up bindings and (gently) tearing out pages.
Several of them had little locks on them, whose keys are long gone. This journal is from 1962, almost fifty years ago:
The oldest one– when Grandpa John first began to journal– was dated 1938!
Here’s an example of what he wrote:
On Tuesday, August 23, 1938, he “went to Idaho Falls to look things over in regard to finding a house to live in this winter”. A couple of days later, on Thursday, he was “fixing pig pasture… one pig was hurt yesterday with the electric fence”. And so on. It’s pretty cool to read about the mundane things happening in the life of an Idaho farmer eight decades ago.
Once I’ve finished this project, and have thousands of pages of journals online somewhere, will anyone read through them? Honestly, I doubt it. But I suspect now and then it’ll be fun to jump in there and look at a few entries and remember Grandpa John.
And so it begins…
