I collect old diaries, journals, letters and photographs from the early 1800s-1920s. A few months ago, I purchased a 1904 diary written by a young man who lived in Boston. I recently began scanning pages in from his diary and posting them over on the Something Awful forums. I've gotten a tremendous positive response and have had more than one person encourage me to blog this diary, which is what I hope to do here.
In the few days since I started posting diary pages on SA, forum members have looked up information on the census and found Willie and his family, found photographs of places he describes and even online transcriptions of the books he was reading.
It's an amazing read and it's like looking into a time capsule of the year 1904. There's an entire year's worth of entries and I've just started posting a few of them. I plan to eventually scan the entire thing.
Underneath each photo is a translation of Willie's handwriting. I have no trouble reading it but it's shocking how many people younger than me cannot read cursive writing (I'm 33).
Read on to take a quick trip back to 1904, where autos were new-fangled contraptions and there was no tv, internet or cell phones...
Comments