What kind of person keeps a diary?

I’ve been doing some reading about the history of diary writing and it’s uses through time (as historical texts, as pedagogy, as research method, etc.)… a lot of the early diary scholars are men, often from England, and they sometimes talk about the reasons people keep diaries. One reason that comes up is ego, possible self-absorption, and vanity. I don’t find this to be the case at all when I read the diaries of these women. In fact, a good number of them, much to my dismay, don’t even write their names in their diaries, despite the seemingly timeless custom of writing one’s name, location, and date on the front inside cover. This requires me to be much more creative to find them in the historical record; I takes note of names, places, and dates and try to string them together, along with some guesses about human nature, family structures, and societal expectations. So far, I have been successful in finding them all, but there might be a day and a diary that confounds me. We will see.

One of these women that didn’t include her name in her dairy, along with Abby Condon, Alma Good, and my own grandmother Dolores Livezey, was Polly Crandall in 1874.

Polly (1811-aft.1880) was 63 when she wrote her diary from her farm in Franklin, Connecticut. She came from a line of skilled house and ship carpenters, but her husband, Alexander, was a farmer. Many of their children and grandchildren are still helping them on the farm in 1874. This poor diary shows all of its 148 years of age, but fortunately the writing is still very readable.