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| Gertrude Matilda Hitchings (1905 - 2001) |
Last year my Auntie Diane gave me my grandmother’s diary,
written in 1920. It was a tiny three
inch book, with every day filled in with tiny script. I was very touched that my Aunt thought of me
to be the guardian of this little treasure.
I recognized Nana’s handwriting right away, and missed her immediately
as I read through the journal. Even though the little entries were short and
sweet, they reflected her personality and her interests that she had as the
elderly woman I knew. Nana, Gertrude
Matilda Hitchings (1905 – 2001), was only fourteen years old when she started
this diary. She was living in Beverly, Massachusetts, where I grew up, too.
I started to transcribe the diary last year, but I ran into
a lot of puzzles and problems reading names, places and long gone
traditions. I decided to post a few
pages every Monday on my blog for “Amanuensis Monday” and use the public to
help me discover the life of a young teenage girl in 1920 Beverly. I’m a member of several genealogy groups on
social media, as well as several local history Facebook groups such as “The
Beverly Heritage Project” and “Historic Beverly”. Many people followed the diary for months,
and made comments, sent email, and left messages on Facebook pages that helped
me to transcribe Nana’s journal.
I posted the first few pages from the diary on 5 December,
2016. This fragile little journal had
lost the first few leaves of paper, so Nana’s diary starts of 7 January
1920. In the first entry I transcribed
she wrote about going to school, “Skating down to Crosby’s meadow at half past
four”. She also wrote about “After supper went down to the shoe” which could be
a mystery for anyone who had never lived in Beverly. I knew what “the shoe” meant – it was the
local slang for the United Shoe Machinery Corporation, where Nana’s father
worked (my great grandfather Arthur Treadwell Hitchings). I once lived a few blocks from “The Shoe”,
where my other grandfather, and other great grandfather once worked. My own
father once worked there as a security guard during college. My other grandmother worked there during
World War II as a “Rosy the Riveter” when the shoe making machinery was
switched over to munitions and war supply materials. My family is very familiar
with “The Shoe”!
The second blog post was published on 12
December 2016, and the diary entries were from 16 January 1920 to
Saturday 24 January 1920. Gertrude mentioned lots of fun things of interest to a teenage girl – school, a sleigh ride, playing
baseball, her little sister having the mumps, sledding down Prospect Hill
(where I went to elementary school!), and a mysterious fire at the “Swiche’s”
farm [sic]. I knew that I had misread
this name because I couldn’t find this family in any Beverly directory or
census.
After publishing this bit of the diary with my questions
about the family name at the burned farm, I received a flood of messages. Lots of people from the town of Beverly wrote
in. Genealogists jumped online and
started to research the date of the fire, the history of the fire department in
Beverly, and other resources. Within two
hours of posting this blog entry a reader found that the family was named ZWICKER, and the farm was located just over the Beverly line in the town of Danvers. From there I was able to update the blog post
with news stories and insurance information on the loss of buildings and animals
in the fire. I was amazed that so many people were reading Nana’s diary.
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| Gertrude and her best friend, Bea Wilkins, who is mentioned in the diary many times. |
I continued to publish a few pages of Nana’s diary every
Monday during early 2017 and the last entry appeared on my blog 12 June
2017. There were many missing pages
from the month of December 1920, and the remaining pages were very tattered,
but I was able to figure out most of it with the help of Beverly resident
Laurie Stevens (who was also very helpful with place names during the whole
project). By the time I published the
last pages I had hundreds of new followers reading the blog, and many of my
cousins were reading along, too.
I decided to thank my Aunt Diane with a book containing all
the blog posts. Each post had the
scanned images of the diary pages, my transcriptions of these pages,
photographs of Gertrude (my grandmother) and her family, relatives, and Beverly
from the 1920s. The book was published
by the online site Blog2Print and I made a copy for my own mother and
myself. My mother had followed the
project online, too, and was extremely interested in the diary, and very
helpful with additional stories about the Hitchings family and the places Nana mentioned.
The book of all 27 blog posts about Nana's 1920 Diary
Thank you Auntie Diane, Mom, and most of all to Nana
Gertrude for this project. And I cannot
say “Thank You” enough to all the genealogists, blog readers, The Beverly Historical Society, Beverly residents
and ex-Beverly residents who helped with comments, messages, research and even
anonymous comments. I couldn’t have finished
this project without each of you. I
think Nana is smiling somewhere right now- knowing that so many people enjoyed reading
her little journal.
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You can still read Nana’s diary online!
The first diary entry is at this link:
You can find all the diary entries at this link (out of
order):
There were 27 blog posts each posted on a Monday from 5
December 2016 until 12 June 2017.
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Heather Wilkinson Rojo, “Crowd Sourcing Nana’s Diary”, Nutfield Genealogy, posted August 7, 2017 (
I like the layout with the tiny pages on top.
ReplyDeleteSuch a wonderful family treasure to share with all of your family members.
ReplyDeleteGreat idea to turn it into a book, and a great story about the power of blogging.
ReplyDelete