Unlock the secrets of your ancestors' private lives with diaries and journals. Here's how to get started finding them.
How do you discover if your ancestor has surviving diaries, or if friends, neighbors or relatives left any? The first step is to contact all of your relatives to see if they might have a diary of one of your ancestors. Even if you've already bugged your relatives for family history information, it's worth asking them specifically about diaries. This may trigger a memory that hadn't surfaced in previous inquiries.
Next try placing queries online to see if some distant relative whom you haven't discovered yet might be in possession of an ancestor's diary.
Cyndi's List of genealogy sites is a good starting point to find websites and messages boards where you can post.
Also search online auction sites such as
ebay for listings containing your family surnames.
Check organizations in the area where your ancestor lived. Write or visit the state historical society, library or archive or local university and public libraries that may have area history or special collections. Ask if they have any diaries by your ancestor or relatives or neighbors.
Consider this old-fashioned but often effective tactic, too: Place an ad or writing a letter to the editor of the local newspaper where your ancestor lived to see if any descendants still live in the area who may have an old diary.
Keep in mind that diaries can end up virtually anywhere. For example, the Tutt Library of Colorado College in Colorado Springs has the diary of Sophronia Helen Stone in its special collections. It covers her overland journey from New Lebanon, Ill., to Yreka, Calif., in 1852. Although she never lived in Colorado Springs or anywhere in Colorado, a professor who taught part-time at the college in 1948-49 donated her diary to the college. So your ancestor, who lived his entire life in Virginia, may have kept a diary that's now in a repository in New Mexico, because the descendant who inherited it lived there and donated it.
How do you find these strays and whether or not a diary may exist in a repository? Start with the
National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC, affectionately referred to as "nuck-muck"). NUCMC has been published annually since 1959 by the Library of Congress, which asks repositories all over the United States to report their manuscript holdings. Earlier volumes are in print in reference departments of college and university libraries and in large public libraries; later volumes are searchable online at the
NUCMC site and through
WorldCat.
The two-volume Index to Personal Names in the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections 1959-1984 is especially helpful.
Another reference guide for women's diaries in particular is Andrea Hinding's Women's History Sources: A Guide to Archives and Manuscript Collections in the United States. Here's a typical entry:
Goltra, Elizabeth Julia.
Papers. 1853. 21 pp.
Univ. of Oregon library, special collections.
Journal describing a journey across the plains from Mississippi to Oregon.
This guide also has a geographical index that makes it useful for checking the area your ancestor and neighbors lived. Look for it in the reference section of larger libraries.