What Ive learned from reading over 10000 diaries
[Music]
i read diaries for a living
other people’s diaries
and in the last 35 years i’ve read over
ten thousand vintage diaries and i’m
often asked how did you ever get started
doing this
well there was actually two reasons the
first is my father john mcnamara
i knew very little about my father but
one thing i did know is life was full of
mystery and deep heartache
he and my mother divorced when i was
just a little girl and i never really
saw much of them after that other than a
few scheduled visits
but on those scheduled visits my dad
always told my sister and i just how
much he loved us
eventually we moved away and then when i
was 13 years old we were just
totally died
his sister sally my name’s sake
was so distraught she took all his
precious
possessions and she placed them in a
trunk and she said no one will ever open
this trunk and that’s when my heart
broke
and then years later painfully i would
learn that my father had taken his own
life
so for 50 years that trunk has stayed
hidden my aunt sally she passed away 10
years ago and that trunk with my
father’s untold stories in it
it’s vanished
and so i was desperate
desperate to know more about this man
who gave me life
yet he took his own life and because of
that trunk i vowed that this will never
happen again
not in my own life perhaps i could stop
it from happening in the lives of those
who have gone before me
so years later i get married
and i have two children
and i am given the first diary
in my collection
and it was my great grandmother’s
1931
diary
her name was mary wood and they called
her
little toot
this is her
on the far left
she’s the little short with a tiny one
peeking out
she writes all about sailing to europe
with the gold star mothers these group
of women
these are mothers who had lost their
sons during world war one
and they were sailing to europe to pay
tribute to them
my great-grandmother lost her son
william
he was stationed on board the uss
cyclops which went down in the bermuda
triangle in 1918
and neither the ship or the crew were
ever found
so
in 1987 i began what became a lifelong
mission
and that was to preserve the untold
stories of others
but little did i know that this journey
i was about to embark on
would change my life in the most
powerful way and all because of the
handwritten word
so the woman that began the gold star
mothers was grace darlene siebold
and she herself had a son during world
war one that she lost and it was then
that she wrote these words
self-contained grief is
self-destructive which brings me to
human emotions and diaries in the 35
years i’ve been reading diaries from
different walks of life and different
generations
i’ve come to realize that human emotions
are timeless and i want to share with
you three passages from three different
diaries in my collection
so in
1792 sir charles middleton
who was then an admiral in the royal
navy loses the love of his life his wife
margaret
they were teenagers when they met in the
1730s on board a ship
and they never got married until 20 plus
years later because her family
disapproved of the relationship
charles and margaret were strong
abolitionists against the slave trade
and they worked very closely with one of
its leaders william wilberforce
so
when his precious wife died
charles picked up a blank diary
and he began to write about her death
and his deep grief
this entry was written about a year
after she died
sunday september 1st 1793
i felt very gloomy of late on account of
the loss of my companion
my friend my wife
oh lord thou knowest best what is good
for me
there are many places and things here
that remind me daily of my loss and i
have many hours to myself to think
i am frequently low when i consider how
much i am left alone by the departure of
my dear companion
and at times i forget
that it is by god’s will
now fast forward
to the year 1927
a young man by the name of john a 32
year old man living in texas loses a
love of his life
his wife lillian
and their baby girl all of which
happened during childbirth
john fought in world war one and this is
where he meets lillian while in france
in 1919
after the war they get married
moved back to the united states and in
1926 is when lillian becomes pregnant
but also in 1926 is when lillian passes
away
as does the baby
and that’s when john
picked up his
blank journal
and he wrote all about his debilitating
grief this entry was written
about three months or more after the two
of them died
march 31st 1927
perhaps i should be in bed i guess
i need some rest
i’ve been lost in the sea of memory
again this evening and the loneliness of
life
the emptiness within my heart has been
urging me on to search and search for
that which might heal it again
happiness oh it is indeed a word of
mystery
i cannot write of things of life that
bring the joy of real happiness because
i am not happy
now fast forward to the year
2008
a 51 year old woman is living in a small
oregon town raising four teenagers
with her husband of 14 years
he is a man she would refer to as an
angel sent by god and it’s a beautiful
fall sunny day
and in the distance she hears this knock
at her front door
and soon that sunny day would turn into
the darkest day she has ever known for
they proceeded to tell her
that her husband has been killed in a
construction accident
well that woman was me
and in that darkness that would consume
me
i picked up my blank diary
and in the span of two years i would
write 12 grief diaries
and those words of graces never rang so
true as they did during those years of
my grief
self-contained grief
is self-destructive
and so i began to write
october 27 2008
two more days and it will be a month
since my incredible husband passed away
into the loving arms of jesus
i’m going to try and keep this journal
so that one day i can look back on it
when my heart isn’t so full of pain
and to see how god was with me
there’s a power in the hand written word
a power in your stories and when you
write your stories down on the pages of
a blank diary little do you know just
how powerful those words can be until
sometimes years and years later
six years ago
i had the privilege of being a very
small part of getting one mother’s
1944 diary
back to her children
her name was mary jane
and you see in 2012 mary jane was
diagnosed with alzheimer’s
so when bridget her daughter received
the diary and started reading her
mother’s
1944 entries back to her
mary jane’s memory came back to those
events in those times written 70 years
earlier
bridget said to me sally
for a brief moment in time
we had our mother back a brief moment
and not only her memories but her
feelings too
it’s truly an amazing study of yourself
when you keep a diary and then you
re-read it years later
but i would say if you do go easy on
yourself because as we all know emotions
are true deep and raw they’re just who
we are the good and the bad
and i tell you
the one of the greatest things that got
me through those years of grief was
reading
diaries grief diaries
from people from the past i thought
oh if they can make it through i can
make it through i am not alone
you
are not alone
we are not alone
1792
1927
1944 2008 and 2021
emotions are timeless aren’t they
now i don’t always read diaries that are
just full of sorrow and grief it’s so
exciting for me when i pick up a diary
and i read it for the first time
i have no idea what i’m about to
discover or what adventure i’m about to
go on
for instance
i have 12 diaries written by a man by
the name of jerome king
they were written in the 1870s and 1880s
jerome was a civil war vet turned
baggage master for a railway
he wrote of train wrecks and train
robberies and preparing dead bodies for
travel
but he also
handled the luggage of some incredible
people like circus performers and
outlaws and prisoners and some very
famous people too like buffalo bill cody
and the famous poet
and playwright oscar wilde
and for me it just doesn’t get any
better than that
well actually it does
because jerome’s best friend
was a one-armed butcher
and this is real life and i thought if
there ever is a movie or a die or i mean
a novel written by
about him i think it needs to be titled
jerome king
baggage master and the one armed butcher
and then i have a diary
i can’t mention his name because i don’t
know if he’s out there right now
it’s written in the 1990s
and it was written by a young man who
decided to take a trip to mexico with a
bunch of his buddies
he actually took several trips while in
mexico and that’s because the group
decided to take psychedelic mushrooms
with him along the way
and he wrote a diary the entire time so
you can imagine what those entries are
like
in fact i want to share one of them with
you
so
skip thought i was god today
and i told him i was
and skip says
what say you god
and i said walter
walter where did that come from
walter
you worry too much
just have fun
now that doesn’t quite make sense does
it
but it might if you’re on psychedelic
mushrooms
is saying
well i want to leave you
with a glimpse into the almost
unbelievable
you know that saying by
mark twain truth is stranger than
fiction
well in the 35 years i’ve been reading
and researching diaries i’ve had several
situations that have happened to me
that fit perfectly with that saying
and i must share one of my favorites
with you now
so 16 years ago i was reading a diary
about a voyage to europe that took place
on
july 13
1938 this is the day it started it was
written by a 12 year old girl by the
name of alice bentley
alice wrote all about pulling out of the
dock in the new york harbor and passing
the statue of liberty and sailing on
this great ship called the normandy
also in the diary were black and white
photos that alice had taken
she took photos of new york photos of
the ship
and then she took this one photo
this is a little gal she met a friend
she met on board her name is barbara
whitting as you can see barbara has her
own camera around her neck and is
standing on the deck of the ship and
then a couple days later
alice writes this july third fifteenth
nineteen thirty eight
today we played tennis i made friends
with a girl my age her name is barbara
whitting
well after i researched this diary and
uh
i ended up selling it to a collector in
florida
my work went on buying and selling
diaries and it wasn’t unusual for me to
get two to three diaries a week in the
ten years pass and it’s the year 2015.
i open up a diary or a box that was just
delivered
and out of this box
is this diary
and i started reading it
and at the top of the first page it says
ss normandy
and then there are several pages of
autographs
that they had collected
and then the diary entries start
and at the top of the diary entries is
the date
july 13th 1938
and the name barbara whitting
and my memory i started going wait a
minute
didn’t i sell a diary and i think it was
about the normandy and i think it was
written
in 1938
by a young girl named alice
i sold it years ago but i think she
mentioned a barbara
and then i kept reading
and as barbara wrote she talked about
pulling away from the dock in the new
york harbor
passing the statue of liberty
and sailing on the great ship called the
normandy
so those two young girls were standing
on this deck of the same ship that left
the new york harbor on july 13 1938 not
knowing each other quite yet
taking photos and writing in two
separate diaries
and those two diaries
ended up with me at two different
moments in my life 10 years apart
and then i kept reading
and as i turned the pages
i came to an entry barber wrote
july 15
1938
betty and i went in swimming and played
deck tennis with another girl
i also know her sister who is 10 in the
very intelligent type the other one’s
name is alice their last name bentley
they are good swimmers
then i kept reading
and as i turned the page
barbara took a picture
everybody meet alice
the author of the first diary i sold 16
years ago
i don’t know if those two girls
ever met each other
and it took me two years
but i got alice’s diary back
and by some great miracle
they’re together now
you know there is nothing nothing like
real life
your life
our memories are
good they’re not great
our memories are partial they’re not
complete our memories are not in exact
they embellish but diary entries written
at the very moment of conception that is
real life as real as the author sees it
at that point in time
and this
is the next generation of diary keepers
two of my four grandchildren peyton and
parker
so what i do i think everybody needs to
keep a diary oh my goodness yes if not
only to put your feelings and your
thoughts from here and here and place
them here but also for the sake of
history and the sake of your family
because your life is important your
untold story is important and don’t ever
let anybody tell you that it’s not
because it is
there’s another saying that we’ve all
heard that i love everybody has a story
but i want to add to that
everybody has a story and one worthy of
sharing and what better place to place
that story than on the pages of a diary
because i know of at least
10 000 people’s untold stories that are
worthy of telling
thank you
[Applause]