52 Ancestors – WEEK 7 – Letters & Diaries
By Cynthia Keefer Patton
We kept
a family daily diary when my husband Shephard Patton, Sr. and I owned a farm
and were building our life and family together. We called our place “Shady Oaks.”
We started recording the diaries in 1983 and they were something I purchased called
“Our Old-Fashioned Country Diary”. It had a place for us to write about our
expectations, record family events. I used it almost like a family bible. We
also recorded the weather, the passing of friends and neighbors, hurricanes,
crop losses, and the addition of cattle to our herd. We wrote in these for over
25 years and only stopped when my husband was battling terminal cancer.
For many years I kept these in two banker’s boxes and
carried them from house to house when I moved after relocating to the Kansas
City area. Recently I decided I should try and transcribe them. I wanted to
turn them into something I could easily share with others, while not losing the
intent and integrity of the original diaries.
As I transcribed I added footnotes, introducing each new
character and providing background to the daily entries. I found photos or illustrations
when I could. This was a labor of love. Only one diary took me several weeks to
complete.
I hope to find the time each year to continue transcribing other diaries until the set is complete and then I can donate the file to the Gulfport Historical Society and some other repositories where people named in our diaries resided.
Here is a sample of my transcription of the first few pages of the first diary:
