Navigation

Journal As Historian

For the most part, anyone who takes pen to journal paper does so under the assumption that the thoughts and musings they pour forth are for their eyes only. However, as history and the publishing industry have shown us, journals of bygone eras have been a tremendous asset to our understanding of the cultures and individuals who came before us.

Take, for example, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, the first known American Indian literary writer who took it upon herself to record traditional Indian stories and poems in her journal – a journal that just a generation-and-a-half later would become the key source for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s bestseller The Song of Hiawatha.

Perhaps the most famous modern example is 1947’s The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. In it, Anne writes to her diary (written as though speaking to an imaginary friend, “Kitty”) about daily life as she and her family hide during the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II.

There are words about her relationships with her father, mother and sister, her dislike for the individuals she shared a room with, and her uncertainty about the direction in which her budding romance with a young man was headed.

But beyond the highly unique circumstances of the aforementioned journals, they offer to us more than just historical facts about the times; these writings also infuse something that is unique to journaling – a sense of place and humanness that any of us could relate to.

“The thing about Anne Frank’s diary, despite the fact that their chance of doom is ever present, she still writes about and has time to be an ordinary human being,” award-winning writer and frequent Peninsula Pulse (sister publication of Door County Living) contributor Justin Isherwood says. “There’s a sense of falling in love, of not liking some people. The people are acting like people, despite the fact that they are faced with the most gloomy of fates.”

In retrospect, it is easy to look at those published journals and diaries with a sense that the individual must have known their perspective was more valuable than the average Joe’s. But unless the diary was published by the author, Isherwood points out that a century ago, propriety dictated keeping one’s thoughts to oneself, usually through use of a journal.

On a smaller scale, long-ago journals of our own family members may provide an insight into where we came from. Isherwood points to his own grandfather’s daily journal, its pages marked with dates ending in 1900, 1901, 1908 and so on. For the most part, the farmer used his pages to keep track of the farm’s math – how much the young cows sold for at the fair, how much he paid for pigs, when his family commenced harvesting rye.

“This journal was his psychologist and it’s not that he spoke often about his own mind but you can tell just sometimes the way he’d talk about the weather being ‘damned miserable.’ And you think, okay, does that reflect his own mind?” Isherwood says.

In this way, journaling reveals the daily life of our ancestors with small glimpses into how their minds worked. It gives us a sense of how the world operated at the time, what was important, how their time was spent, and reminds us of the importance of keeping records of our own time today – a time when Facebook records our daily updates, Instagram captures the scenes around us, and technology is at our fingertips in a more convenient and faster way than pen and paper.

When we peruse the selection of old journals at museums, we are looking into the daily lives of people we never knew. But somehow, reading their thoughts brings them to life in a way nothing else could.

Historical organizations throughout Door County recognize this, many of them boasting small collections of journals from the peninsula’s early settlers. The Ephraim Historical Foundation has several boxes of diaries from Ida “Miss Munda” Anderson, the sixth child born to Aslag and Greta Anderson, who owned and operated the Anderson Store in Ephraim.

Like the journals of many, it reveals a simple life centered on the happenings at the store and life on the peninsula. She wrote everyday, opening her entries with a description of the weather and what time she awoke.

“This is a beautiful morning,” an entry from October 23, 1940 reads. “Sun shining so bright. The wind is from North West. Just a nice little breeze. The Bluff looked beautiful where the sun shone on it. The foliage was beautiful. I got up at 5:45 and came to the store at 7:30.”

Other entries detail her visitors for the day, how busy she was making beds, the tasks she took on at the store (Mondays were laundry day), who called to pay their bill and how much it was, and who invited her over for supper, along with what they enjoyed at the meal.

It was a life of a woman seldom idle. Sometimes she was so busy, she only wrote three lines. But she still wrote. The journal entries of “Miss Munda” and her relatives were, though basic, telling of the times, as documented in A Memoir of the Aslag Anderson Family In Ephraim, by Marianne Kellman (with contributions by Helen Timmons).

Of particular note was a journal entry in 1901 in which “Olive wrote that Mr. Cook from Menomonie gave Adolph a ride in his automobile,” and another at a later date, when Munda attended a women’s suffrage meeting in Sister Bay “and wrote in her diary that she would ‘have to think about it.’”

Mrs. Alice Lundberg, wife of Charles Alexander (Alex) with whom she operated the successful Lundberg Store (general store and chandlery) in Fish Creek, is the owner of several diaries owned by the Gibraltar Historical Association. These “A Line A Day – Five Year” diaries provided just four lines of space for each day, which Alice separates with the use of pencil and black or blue pen.

Her diaries were a way of tracking when she went to church and who delivered the sermon, her guests, who wrote letters to her, and when she had her hair “shampooed and set.” Several names appear throughout her diaries – Lucille, Grace, George, Bill – people who undoubtedly had a positive presence in her life based on her entries. Her daughter, Alma, was of special note, particularly in a February 1927 entry in which Alice documents the beautiful gifts her daughter gave her for Valentine’s Day: “Red tulips on table in dining room. Sweet Peas in Living Room in vases.”

Aligning with Isherwood’s vision of generations long gone, even emotional subjects garnered little more than a few words in Alice’s diary. September 13, 1930 was a particularly bittersweet date: “My 40th wedding anniversary. Daddy has been gone 5 1/2 years.”

Emotions or not, she was recording her time in a way that sheds light on her character. Diaries and journals were, and continue to be, a place to share emotional vulnerabilities, thoughts, musings, annoyances, or to delve deeper into one’s psyche.

Isherwood himself uses a daily journal as a way to tend to his inner self – his demons, what he’s done, what he hasn’t done, what he’s failed at. His studies in psychology taught him that part of being a healthy human being is having an ongoing dialogue with oneself, something that can be achieved through daily writing.

“I think part of being a good, whole healthy human being is having that medium where you can have that dialogue,” he says. “In this case, you’re talking to yourself. Or you’re talking to your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren.”

Perhaps the best part of journaling is the simplicity of doing it – all that’s needed is a writing utensil and paper. But for the more creative types, look no further than Muriel Foster’s Fishing Diary. This exceptional diary by English diarist Muriel Foster is as much a piece of art as it is a log on the conditions and catches of her fly-fishing days. Colorful renditions of lures, landscapes, ducks and fish accompany her insight and poetry in a way that matches a new segment of journaling in today’s world – that of the collage journal in which people sketch and collect flowers or other mementos to include with their writing.

On the other hand, the advent of the internet spawned countless ways for individuals to bring their journals into the digital era. One Google search of “journaling” brings up 12.3 million search results (in 0.27 seconds, nonetheless), a majority of which encourage online blogs and websites. But with technology updates imminent and ever changing, there is greater concern for the potential for it all to be wiped out in the blink of an eye.

Isherwood references a recent early morning BBC radio program he heard about the risk humans have of losing the details of their lives because of technology.

“How long does that information remain viable before erosive forces at the atomical level corrupt it and it’s lost?” Isherwood asks.

“What we have invested as families and beyond, as institutions in a record may be lost,” he added. “Fifty years from now, there may be a big black hole of what happened in people’s lives, what happened to companies because some of the economic data is just lost because it’s no longer kept in a physical form or paper form.”

Not that keeping a journal in a physical form necessarily guarantees survival into the 22nd century – there is always the risk that a fire, flood or the simple act of relocation could take away the physical forms. But at the end of the day, a journal is your chance to live in the moment – to write about what you’ve encountered, your struggles, your dreams.

Isherwood sees journaling as perhaps the fairest form of literature – a hobby that is undertaken by individuals who feel their time deserves a fair record without the pressure of trying to create the next great novel.

“Sooner or later, you’re doing it for yourself,” Isherwood said. “You’re not trying to pretty things up, you’re not in search of the great novel, you’re not trying to sell anything, you’re just recording it at the basic, average mean.”

How does one start? If you ask Isherwood, it’s simple – ask yourself what mattered today. As for what’s important enough to land in a museum someday? Well, that’s for a future generation to calculate.

“Yes, it may turn into something quite valuable down the road if it survives, if people keep it and cherish it and see that it survives,” Isherwood said. “Any person’s journal will turn into gold eventually. They always will. They still work on a daily basis for the person doing it. Sometimes I think the very act of writing, no matter what you write, is some measure of health. You’re slowing your person down enough to record the day, even if it is the price of hogs.”