About the Project
Mom and I were sorting some boxes of old family photos and records and uncovered the journals of my great-grandmother Emma. I brought them home with me and started reading, and I was hooked! As she and my great-grandfather Tell lost their business, and then their house, and then their farm during the Depression, I knew where they ended up but had no idea of the journey in between. The daily accounts of farm life are so far removed from my day-to-day experience that I was continually amazed. I found myself looking up things like how they treated diabetes in the 1930s, and when commercial air travel became common. I got some insight into the life of my grandparents and how they made a living and raised a family as music teachers and church/performing musicians.
It's a little tedious to read through *all* the entries, but there's so much good stuff here that I wanted to share a lot of the material with a larger audience. I have started with the very first entry, and at the beginning I am transcribing the whole thing because the entries are relatively short and set the stage for future parts of the story. In the later entries I will be more selective and share the highlights and most interesting parts. In each post, I have added some of my own commentary and shared some of the things I explored as I was reading the journals. Most of the people who are named in these pages are now gone, but some are still alive. I've tried to be sensitive to the privacy and dignity of everyone involved, while trying to share the richness of the story and the emotional life of Emma and those around her.
About Emma
Emma Estella Troutman, my great-grandmother, was the daughter of Luther Troutman and Adella Jameson. She was born in Iowa on August 11, 1879, and married Tell Emmett Boylan on August 22, 1900, in Hubbard, IA. When she started these journals she and her husband Tell were still living in Iowa but, as you’ll see, they didn't stay there! She had three children: Katharine, Gerald, and Ruth, my maternal grandmother.
About the Journals
I don't know what inspired Emma to start these journals. The first entry, of just one sentence, was made on October 19, 1927, in a small, cloth-bound 1928 diary. On the first page she wrote Mrs. T. E. Boylan, From Katharine, Christmas 1927. She must have received it early and decided to start writing, and kept on quite faithfully for nearly 20 years. She used this same book for her 1928 and 1929 entries, which are fairly short, and then started a new book each year. The later books are larger, and the entries longer. They start to taper off toward the end, and the writing looks weaker. When she died in 1956, she and Tell were living in Moylan, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia, with my grandparents and their family, including my mother. As I get toward the end I'll try to include some of Mom's recollections of Emma as well.
Linda Hoopes
December, 2021
In the meantime, tell your friends!