Diaries & Journals

Carol Sampson memorabilia--including love letters when they were courting. What a treasure.

So a big assignment I was given by my mother before she died was to write her life history. Wow! How do you do that and do it right in any reasonable amount of time? Especially for a person who kept 100's of journals and was an English graduate in college, always perfect penmanship-- my mother. I want to do it right and honor her, etc--alot of pressure to say the least.

I have been struggling with that project for at least 2 years now and is my main "To Do". It is started and I am up to 43pgs of my Mom's life--bringing her up to 1960. Born in 1919 died in 2008. I have a ways to go still and the goal was to have it done by this year's family reunion. There are weeks when I don't even touch it, because life is hectic enough and it is something that I prefer to put off. That's because it takes quite a bit to get into writing and then you have to devote hours and hours to just generating a couple of paragraphs. Also it needs to be quiet so I can concentrate. We always have our fair share of people in and out, company from out of town, and there never seems to be empty days when there is nothing going on that I can devote to this. But I have forced myself to carve out a day here and there. Still it is basically hard!!

I have referred to Mom's own condensed version of her first journal for this first section (to 1960). Of course it is Mom telling a glorified version, but its been very helpful. Then this past week, I knew that there had to me more than what she was telling me in the journal, and I went searching through her boxes and boxes of memoralia, journals, diaries and I uncovered another group of original entries in some ledgers and a diary.

It was a 5 year diary she received from her brother Floyd Christmas 1939. One where there are only 4-5 lines for each day, then the next year, and so on. I started reading it and then reading it out loud to Doug for some entries. There are alot of repetitious entries; ie, washed today and cleaned the house, but then there are some really interesting, neat entries and gives us the picture of a young wife, mother in the first 4 years of her married life. It shows the economics of 1940 when their paycheck was $55.00 for a 2 week period, or the Sunday they went out to find the car had all flat tires and they walked to church. (war time rationing left poor tires on cars). Also the entry I uncovered--Mom and Dad and Allen had taken a trip up to Delta. They were outside Holden when a tire blew. There was no spare tires with war time rationing going on. A cousin stopped and offered to give them a lift into Holden. But Dad says (why Dad posted an entry in Mom's diary is ??--but its his handwriting)that he was warned by the Spirit to not go with him. They caught a ride with someone else, and this person later reported back to Dad that on his way back from Holden, he found the cousin's car wrecked on the side of the road. A wonderful story that almost didn't get passed on to his progenitors.

Anyway it (the diary)should be required reading for all Mom's children and grandchildren, and great grandchildren. That way they would get a clearer picture of Carol's life at that time, and I think would draw them closer to them. It has for me. Also it makes her just that more real.

I have found that I have to pray, and humble myself as I do the writing, but as I do so the words come easily to my mind, and the next topic to write about pops into my mind and it flows. I hammer away at this project a little at a time, and look forward when it will be completed. But then, it has been an amazingly absorbing endeavor that will have lasting benefits. And what could be better than that?