Preserving Family History with Sue Burns

My guest today is Sue Burns, author of the book A Common Life, A Voice from the Progressive Era where she published her great-great grandmother Mary's diary from the late 19th century Iowa farm life.

We talk about the demographics of Iowa in the late 19th century., Her great great grandmother, Mary, managed to raise six children without losing any, although there might have been unrecorded miscarriages or infant deaths. Sue highlights that Mary's diary, like many others from the time, did not extensively cover topics like pregnancy or childbirth, reflecting a cultural silence around such matters.

Sue discusses Mary's diary entries regarding deaths in the community, which were frequent and treated as a natural part of life. Mary herself experienced grief after her husband's death, which followed a period of illness and medical procedures documented in the diary.

Describing Mary's farm, Sue mentions its size (about 240 acres), the crops grown, and the various buildings on the property, including a windmill, barn, and corn crib. She details Mary's involvement in farm management, including decisions about planting, harvesting, and eventually renting out the land for income.

Sue reflects on Mary's accounts of butchering chickens and a pig, speculating about her involvement in these tasks and the practicalities of farm life. She also discusses the layout of Mary's house, including a main living room with a coal-burning stove and a separate "summer kitchen" building.

She recounts the process of preserving Mary's diary, which was written on fragile paper found in an attic. Sue and her mother collaborated to transcribe and digitize the diary, eventually donating a copy to the Iowa Women's Archive.

Sue emphasizes the importance of preserving family histories like Mary's diary, which offers unique insights into past lives and experiences. She notes the limitations of relying solely on written records and highlights the value of oral history and personal connections in understanding the past.

https://marybriggsacommonlife.blogspot.com/

https://www.amazon.com/Common-Life-Voice-Progressive-Era

Transcript

[00:00:00] Sue: It was just part of life, which on the one hand, I think is a very natural attitude to have because it is part of life. Everybody who lives eventually dies.

[00:00:09] Jill:  Welcome back to Seeing Death Clearly. I'm your host, Jill McClennen, a death doula and end of life coach here on my show. I have conversations with guests that explore the topics of death, dying, grief, and life itself.

[00:00:24] My goal is to create a space where you can challenge the ideas you might already have about these subjects. I want to encourage you to open your mind and consider perspectives beyond what you may currently believe to be true. My guest today is Sue Burns, author of the book, A Common Life, A Voice from the Progressive Era, where she published her great great grandmother Mary's diary from the late 19th century Iowa farm life.

[00:00:48] In our show, she discusses the realities of infant mortality rates at the time, Mary's experiences with grief. and managing the family farm after the death of her husband. Sue also shares about the process she went through from loose pages of a diary through the publishing of the book and about the importance of preserving family histories.

[00:01:10] Thank you for joining us for this conversation. Welcome to the podcast, Sue. I'm so happy to have you on today. I think your book sounds fascinating. I'm excited to just kind of hear all about it. Why don't you just start us off though? Tell everybody a little bit about who you are, if you want to share where you come from originally, anything like that.

[00:01:30] Thanks, Jill. 

[00:01:30] Sue: It's wonderful to be here and I really appreciate the opportunity to have this conversation with you. My name is Sue Burns. I have lived in Iowa my entire life. I grew up on a farm, which is part of the reason that I was really attracted to my great great grandmother's diaries, because she was also living on a farm.

[00:01:49] 20th century with my experience of growing up on a farm, was just fascinating to me. And I really, really enjoyed all the research that I did into her diary, what she was writing about, what was going on in the world at the time, who were the people that were important to her and what her life was like.

[00:02:09] It was a fun process for me and I'm really happy to have that book out in the world now. 

[00:02:12] Jill: Well, I'm really excited to hear from you. Because my grandmother grew up on a farm. I did not. My grandmother and I were really close. When I was little, my bedtime stories were her telling me stories about life on the farm and what it was like when she grew up.

[00:02:27] But we don't have any written documentation about any of it. So other than the stories that I remember hearing, my cousins and I will kind of share stories of what we all remember. There's not that written, like, this is actually the words that somebody in my family used. And so when I heard about your book, I was really fascinated by it.

[00:02:51] Because even though I'm in New Jersey, and you said you're Iowa, yeah, so different parts of the country, but I'm sure it wasn't that different living on a farm around that same time period. So I'm just excited to hear more about what you learned. through the book. And also, again, like you mentioned, the differences and the similarities compared to life then versus now.

[00:03:13] And of course, my podcast being about death, I really want to hear about how your, you said it's your great, great grandmother. Yes. Wow. So I really want to hear about her experiences with death and grief. Partially because I know that back then, people used to lose children more regularly, like it was just, it was something that we don't live with necessarily now, whether it was illnesses or accidents or whatever else it was, just childbirth.

[00:03:43] That's partially why people had so many children, because unfortunately they knew that a couple of them were probably going to die, and it's terrible, but that was their reality. Well, when 

[00:03:53] Sue: you talk about the death rate among children. I was looking at census data from 1880 because her diary starts in 1888.

[00:04:03] And so I was kind of trying to figure out just what the demographics of Iowa was like at the time and how these things work. And I was looking at the census data for 1880. And one of the things that really struck me about that was almost half of all of the deaths that were recorded for that census period were children under the age of five.

[00:04:25] And so I was looking into the actual death rate, and around 1880, it was about one in every six or seven children that died young, like under the age of five. And my great great grandmother, her name is Mary, She had six children, and as far as I know, she didn't lose any of her children. If there was a miscarriage, or if there was a child that was born and didn't live very long, I don't know anything about that, given the interval between her children.

[00:04:54] Doesn't really look like there was space for her to have lost child, but I don't know. I mean, there could have been a miscarriage and that's just not something that they talked about. I got associated with an organization called the Iowa Women's Archive that's based out of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, and they collect diaries of Iowa women.

[00:05:12] And when I was speaking with the curators there, one of the things that they told me is that's just not something anybody ever wrote down or talked about in all of their diaries that they have in their collection. Nobody writes about being pregnant, giving birth. It's just suddenly they, Oh, well, this other child is here now.

[00:05:29] And they just didn't write about it. And she didn't write about it either. Even when she was having grandchildren being born in the early teens, it was just, Oh, well, you know, my daughter had a son. Or they had another girl. She didn't really talk about the births like we would now. That, oh, you know, it was 22 inches long and weighed eight and a half pounds and lots of black hair and none of that stuff.

[00:05:54] In fact, one of the things that I looked into was, okay, how old were each of her grandchildren when she first mentioned them in her diary? And for the most part, until they were eight, ten, she didn't even mention him by name. It's just, oh, it was Roy's baby or it was the baby or something like that. She didn't even mention them by name until they got to be older.

[00:06:16] So yeah, your point about infant mortality back then, it was. It was very high. One of her daughters lost two children young. One of them was an infant and one of them was like five and a half. Another grandchild was like 13 and a half when he died. So she had a lot of deaths in her family. Her husband died.

[00:06:38] Very early in the diary, like 1903, so it was part of her life. And even outside of her family, there were a lot of diary entries that said, Oh, I heard that Mrs. Smith died and the funeral is going to be tomorrow. And she would often talk about whether they had been sick. a long time or whether it was sudden or whether it was unexpected.

[00:06:58] And if she decided to go to the funeral, she would talk about what church was it held at? Where were they going to be buried? Who was preaching? And she would talk about seeing neighbors and family and friends. So it's like these, when she did go to the funerals, they were kind of a social event. There were people that she didn't see all the time that would get together for these funerals.

[00:07:16] It was a very common occurrence in her writing that She would note that somebody had died. It was just part of life for her. And it was a, it was kind of a hard life. Living back then, there were no antibiotics. So diseases were a much bigger problem. She wrote a lot about people dealing with smallpox or diphtheria or tuberculosis.

[00:07:37] Or she was also living during the flu pandemic. back then. So that was a factor in her diary as well. Death was, was definitely a part of living. It wasn't something that she seemed to rail against, or it didn't seem to be a problem for her. It was just part of life, which on the one hand, I think is a very natural attitude to have.

[00:07:59] Because it is part of life. Everybody who lives eventually dies. But she did deal with grief, too, because she talked about how desperately she missed her husband after he died. And he had a very long, lingering, painful illness that she nursed him through. So she, I'm sure, you know, dealt with her grief long before he actually died and then continued to miss him after he died.

[00:08:21] Jill: Did she say when he was ill? Like, because again, I'm imagining the way that my grandmother Described the farm that they lived on when that it's not like there was going to be doctors and nurses that were going to come around and help you take care of somebody that she described that process at all of taking care of him, what that experience was like.

[00:08:42] And even when he died, I assume he was in the house right on the farm. They didn't put people in hospitals like they knew do nowadays. So was there any information about that? 

[00:08:54] Sue: Yeah, actually, in 1901 is when kind of his health issues seemed to start in the diary. She would talk about, oh, Lem was worse last night, or Lem didn't come to bed, he stayed in his chair last night, or, oh, Lem's better today, and then now he's worse.

[00:09:12] And at one point, she did say that she called for the doctor, because there was a doctor in the area. And he did come to the house and examined him. And she didn't really write too much about that until I think it was in April. They called for the doctor and the doctor came. And then shortly after that, he had an operation on his toe and To do, to perform that operation, there were two doctors and three men that came to the house, and they did the surgery at his house, and she never actually said what the, the operation was, just that it was on his toe, but I found a record that was written by their granddaughter, after the fact, and the granddaughter was, was dead.

[00:09:52] Alive at the time that the operation happened, she wrote that they had amputated his toe. So this, this procedure happened in their house. And then there was a process of probably three months where he was recovering from that surgery. When she would talk about, well, he came and had dinner at the table for the first time, or he walked to the mailbox, or he walked around the house without help kind of thing.

[00:10:15] So it was quite a process for him to recover from that surgery. And then there's really. a gap in the diary from that point until he died. And I think that's the point where his illness was really getting serious. And she doesn't write specifically about that while it's happening because then the next entry is that he died at 3 a.

[00:10:39] m. this morning. But in his obituary, there was this line, That something like for, for over two long years, he was prostrated by disease and suffering and waited patiently for death to release him. And I don't know who wrote his obituary, the way it was written, it kind of sounds like Mary wrote it, but that line in his obituary really tells me those two years where she was not writing in her diary were really, really hard for her.

[00:11:08] that basically her life was probably consumed with taking care of him and dealing with his health issues. It, it sounds like really, he had a really hard, hard, painful time those last couple years of his life. 

[00:11:21] Jill: And what type of a farm did they have? Like what did people farm back then? I don't even know what my family farmed back then.

[00:11:27] Sue: Well, the farm that she lived on, it was about 240 acres, and it was land that was originally homesteaded by her husband's father. I found the land patent that was issued by the United States government giving him this 240 acres and part of it had a creek running through it and they had orchards and a grove and she made a distinction between those two things.

[00:11:52] I'm assuming that the grove was just trees and the orchard was like fruit bearing trees and then the rest of the farm was row crops. They grew. corn, wheat, oats, hay. Those are the main cash crops that she talked about, but she also had fairly extensive gardens, and so she raised a lot of their own vegetables in her garden, and she loved flowers, so she had a lot of flowers.

[00:12:15] So that was, I don't know how typical that size of farm was for that time period. After her husband died, there were some estate things that changed the ownership of the land a little bit. But at the time she died, she still had like 120 acres of land in Dallas County. She had also inherited some land when her parents died, and that's in a different county.

[00:12:38] But she managed the farm after her husband died. She had to deal with making decisions about planting and harvest. And after a while. She mostly just rented it out, so she didn't actively farm it herself, but she rented to other people who did. And that was her main source of income, was still that, that farm throughout the rest of her life.

[00:12:57] Jill: Yeah, because I'm thinking if she had to really care for somebody full time, plus still having a farm like that, like, how did she do that? Did they have, And I guess, again, that's partially why you have so many kids, so that you can have your children working on the farm. But that just seems like a lot of work for somebody to do both.

[00:13:17] And how old were her children at the time when her husband died? 

[00:13:20] Sue: They were all adults. At the time he died, their youngest daughter was still living at home. She was in her 20s, like mid 20s, actually probably more like late 20s. So it was. Mary and her daughter, Lily, and her husband, who were all living in the house at the time that he died.

[00:13:38] And she did talk about having people come in to help her. And, and she talked about one of them, named one of them specifically, and it was a man. And I'm guessing that that's probably because if her husband got to the point where he was not able to be mobile by himself, she would have needed somebody strong enough to help her move him.

[00:13:58] So she did have people that she could call on to come in and help her with things. But for the most part, it was her and her daughter taking care of him and dealing with the farm as he was failing and then eventually taking over after he died. And how long did she live 

[00:14:14] Jill: after he died? 

[00:14:15] Sue: He died in 1903 and she died in 1922.

[00:14:19] So almost two years. 20 years. 

[00:14:21] Jill: And then she just stayed by herself after that. She never got remarried or anything. 

[00:14:26] Sue: She never remarried. Her daughter lived with her for another three years until she married, and then she and her husband moved to South Dakota where they homesteaded land. And then there was a period of time where it was just Mary in her house.

[00:14:41] And I think that that was probably the first time in her life she had ever lived alone because she was number nine of ten children in her family of origin. And so it was already a full bustling household when she was born and then she probably lived there until She married her husband and their first child was born less than a year later.

[00:15:06] So from that point on, then it was her children and her family that she lived with. And then once all the kids were gone and her husband died and her final child married and moved away, it's like, I'm betting that's the first time she ever lived alone. And that was a huge adjustment for her as well. So she would occasionally have a niece, her brother's daughter, who would come and stay with her, especially in the wintertime, to help with keeping things going.

[00:15:31] The niece had never married, and I kind of think that's sort of what she did, is she went around and helped family members whenever they needed it. But she did pay her, you Something for her help around the house. It was company for her and it was also help with all of the chores that needed to get done just to take care of her farm.

[00:15:48] And she did occasionally have animals too. I mean, in the beginning of the diary, she talked about selling calves. So they had cows that they would breed and then sell off the calves when they got older. She talked about having a pig. that they were gonna butcher. She talked about having chickens, and at one point she got a horse and buggy, so she had a horse that she needed to take care of, too.

[00:16:08] So yeah, I mean, it was, I think, a typical farm for the time. 

[00:16:12] Jill: Did she ever talk about slaughtering the animals and things like that? Because we're so far removed from that now. Like, most of us, I would probably say most of us, have never actually seen an animal. Be killed for consumption, right? And I know again, having conversations with my grandmother, that's just what they did.

[00:16:31] They raised the animals. And I remember when I became vegetarian, her and I having a long conversation about how I wasn't comfortable eating meat, and I eat meat now, but I wasn't comfortable eating meat after I went to culinary school and I learned about the factories that these animals were raised in, and I said it was different when she was growing up, they were raising the animals right there, and they also would eat all of it like nothing went to waste.

[00:16:58] If you had a cow and you slaughtered that cow, you were going to eat it all. And it's just a very different way that we do things now. And so, I don't know, it's just interesting that people live their life, that that was part of their reality. Did she ever talk about that at all? Or was it just so common that she never even mentioned it?

[00:17:17] Some of both. 

[00:17:18] Sue: She did talk about butchering and cleaning some chickens. And I'm assuming that they were her own chickens. She would raise them and then at some point Cause she talked about she'd cleaned and dressed this chicken and then put it outside to freeze because it was in the middle of winter.

[00:17:34] And at that point, I don't think she had electricity at the house. She would have had a root cellar, but it was the middle of winter. It's like, you want something to free, just put it outside. So I know she talked about her doing the butchering of the chickens. And she talked about having a pig that they were going to butcher, but I don't know if, she never said whether she was going to do the butchering or whether she was going to have somebody help her with that, because that's a big job.

[00:17:57] I mean, I remember when I was a kid, my, my family would butcher a cow or butcher pigs, and that's a lot of work. I remember coming home from school and it's like, oh, well, it's butcher day and there's vats of organs in the basement, because like you say, they used all of it. And, That was just part of it. You know, so I have some of that experience seeing that process done, so I kind of know how that works.

[00:18:21] And it's a big job. I'm kind of assuming that, yeah, she did it, but I really don't know. She didn't say specifically. 

[00:18:27] Jill: And I do wonder sometimes if part of the way that we view death now in our culture is because we are so far removed from it. Most of us, again, have never really seen death up close. Right.

[00:18:43] We are, again, back then, or even it sounds like when you were younger, right, which is not that long ago. You're not that old. Like that. Well, thank you. Yeah. But like that you were still seeing these things. And I wonder if that gives us a different almost respect for life or respect even for death. I feel like it would change you because I've never been there for an animal being killed.

[00:19:07] When I was in culinary school, there was a farmer that donated a pig. And he had killed the pig, but like we got the whole thing in. And so we were able to break it down and take it apart. We even made head cheese, which I was super excited to tell my grandma about. She was like, Oh, we used to eat that on the farm.

[00:19:23] I was like, this stuff is nasty. I don't know how you ate it. And she was like, we had to eat everything. There was a bunch of kids. When you killed an animal, you ate it all. So even seeing that much, changed my perspective on meat and the consumption of meat in our country in the way that we, I don't want to say like waste so much, but in a lot of ways, we're killing a lot of animals and not really using as much as we should be, at least in my mind.

[00:19:52] And so I wonder if there is a difference. Like, do you think that it changed? Your perspective, like I'm assuming you probably had some friends that didn't grow up with that. And so like, do you think that there was any difference? 

[00:20:03] Sue: The area that I grew up was very rural, and I went to a rural school. So most of the other kids that I was going to school with were also rural kids.

[00:20:12] And I don't remember ever really talking with them about stuff like that. And Part of it was you just, I mean it was just life. You didn't really think about it. It was just part of what happened on the farm. But I do think that you've got a point there about we relate to death in general and specifically death of the animals that provide food for us.

[00:20:36] I know growing up it's like, but you don't waste stuff. You make the best use of things that you can. You reuse what you can. Like Mary did a lot of quilting. And some of the quilts that she made, it's like you take clothes that maybe it's all worn out at the elbows and the collar, but the back is good. So you take pieces of that and you make a quilt out of it.

[00:20:57] You don't waste things. And I think that was the attitude toward the animals as well. You take care of them because they're going to take care of you at some point. I don't know that they necessarily. Treated them with reverence. I don't remember that as I was growing up. So I don't really imagine that that happened in Mary's time either, but yeah, you don't, you don't waste it.

[00:21:17] You make use of it because you need it. That's part of making your own food, making your own everything that you had to, to consume or everything that you needed. You made it yourself, you took care of it yourself, or you had to buy it. And that money had to come from somewhere. So it was a very frugal time, but she lived well.

[00:21:34] I mean, she had a house. She had a farm. She had income. I think she was pretty well off for that time period. She wasn't poor. She was a landowner. She had these resources that she could use, but it took a lot of work to make it happen. She talked about her day might include spading up the garden and chopping wood and doing all of these other things.

[00:21:56] And it's like, it was a full day. It was a very physical day. And it took a lot of effort to, to keep her going, to keep the farm going. And then having children on top of that. Yeah, she had six children in eight years. 

[00:22:09] Jill: So I don't know how she did that. I don't either. I have two. I can't imagine. Having that many children and being able to then still be so physical in your day to day life.

[00:22:23] Did you ever talk about like the farm itself about like the physical aspects? Like again, I'm thinking my grandmother said the farmhouse that they lived in how every room had a fireplace in it because that was the only real source of heat and how all the girls slept in one bed because in the wintertime, winters in New Jersey especially then.

[00:22:43] They got really cold. And so like all the girls would basically pile into one bed to sleep together with their fireplace and the outhouse was outside and you had to go outside and use an outhouse and those types of things that again, I don't have any real lived experience of it. And it just seems so far removed from the way that I live my life.

[00:23:05] So did she ever describe any of that part of her daily life? She talks about 

[00:23:11] Sue: the farm because one of the chapters in my book is about the land in the homestead and what I could determine about how that was set up. She had a windmill. So I'm assuming that that was the pump that brought water up from the water table down below.

[00:23:26] She had a barn because she talked about a cyclone. that came through and knocked the barn off of its foundation. It didn't knock it down, but it moved it. And so she talked about the process of working with the insurance company of getting that barn repaired. She had a corn crib. In talking to my dad, he remembers that there was, he called it a hired man's house.

[00:23:47] That was also on the property. She never mentioned that, but my dad remembers that her oldest son, when he got married, he and his new wife lived in it for a while. And the house itself, she never really talked about the organization of it inside. I know there was a stove in the living room that burned coal.

[00:24:07] And that's how they heated that room. And I know that there was a separate little building just beside the house that she called the summer kitchen. And I have a picture of her house. And it kind of looks like it started off as this small house. And then there's like this other section that looks like maybe it was added onto later.

[00:24:29] And I'm kind of assuming that maybe originally it was that small house, and as they had more children, they added more space. But she never really said what the configuration of those rooms were, or who slept where, or anything like that. I mean, I know she had six children, four boys and two girls. The house would not have been heated other than by those little stoves.

[00:24:51] And she never mentioned it other than the one that was in that main living room. At one point, I think it was in 1908, the house burned down. Because you're heating with coal or wood or whatever and she talked about she had her breakfast and she was writing some letters and it was a cold day so she built a fire and then she went to go turn the heat off, damp down the fire and discovered the house was on fire.

[00:25:14] It's like it had gone up in the attic in the roof and it just, she said it burned, it all burned down. And she did rebuild and I don't know what that house looked like. And that's all I really know. I mean, when she died, she did not have a will. So she, there were probate records that listed all of her personal possessions and that included four beds.

[00:25:32] So, yeah, There were four beds in the house, how they were used, I really don't know, but there was a ton of blankets and quilts. And I think that gets back to your point about it was cold and they maybe only heated that living room. If you needed more warmth, you just put on another blanket or another quilt or something.

[00:25:48] I think it's fascinating that you were able to talk to your grandmother and that all the girls were sleeping in the same bed. It's like, well, how do you eat? It's a great way to stay warm. Yeah. 

[00:25:57] Jill: Oh yeah, for sure. I think about cold nights now and I have heat, so I could only imagine what it would be like.

[00:26:04] But how did you actually find her diary? Was it something that was like passed down or did you find it in a box? I'm thinking how many of these things got lost in so many families. I'm so glad you found this one. It's really amazing. 

[00:26:21] Sue: That's kind of a story in itself. And in fact, there's a chapter in the book that talks about this because it all started back in probably the mid to late nineties.

[00:26:30] And I don't know exactly how this happened, but my imagination is telling me that, okay, somebody was moving out of their home into maybe an assisted living place or something. And the kids were cleaning out the And up in an attic, they found the physical pages for this diary. And I found out about it when I'd gone out to, to visit my parents.

[00:26:50] And my mom was telling me about this project that she was working on. She'd gotten the physical diary. And the thing about the, the diary was that it was written on really cheap tablet paper, like newsprint type tablet paper. And as soon as the diary was removed from this attic, those pages started to disintegrate.

[00:27:08] And she was really concerned about the words that were printed on them not being lost. And so she was using her electric typewriter and trying to transcribe this diary. And this was this project that she was working on. And I'm like, there's got to be a better way. Let's work on this. And so we ended up working together.

[00:27:27] And I ended up using an OCR program to scan the pages and try to convert them to text. And I didn't really have a lot of hope of that working very well because it was handwriting. And I didn't really think technology would work very well with that, but it didn't do a bad job. So what we ended up doing was she would read aloud from the diary and I would follow along on the, the pages of text that the program had produced.

[00:27:51] And then I would say, Oh, well, no, that's not what it says. And I would correct the little artifacts of the OCR process. And that's how we got. the actual diary text preserved into a text document. And that's kind of where it sat for a long time. My mom did a lot of work trying to find, like, photographs.

[00:28:10] There's a spot in the diary where she writes about, they went to Adele and had a four generation picture taken. Well, my mom found that photo. And so we were like, Putting these pieces together, I did most of the formatting and organizing of the information, and she was looking for images, and then we put them together.

[00:28:28] And she had a bunch of these printed up and had a party for all of the descendants that she could find and handed out a copy of this diary that we'd produced. And that was it for a long time. And I'd always thought that There's got to be somebody who would be interested in this. I mean, there's so much history recorded in her words from this time period.

[00:28:49] And that's when I found the Iowa Women's Archive in Iowa City. And so I donated a copy of the diary to their archive. And they were really excited about it because they'd had nothing in their collection that went back to 1888. They had a lot of stuff from like World War II, some stuff a little older than that, but nothing that went back to 1888.

[00:29:08] And the other thing that they were really excited about was that Mary actually wrote things. I mean, a lot of the diaries were, Oh, it rained last night. It's colder today. It doesn't really tell you a whole lot. And Mary actually wrote things. So they were really excited about that. And it was actually talking to them that got me excited about trying to dig into what Mary wrote.

[00:29:30] It's like, what was going on in the world? Who is this person that she's talking about? Why is this important to her? And that's what actually kind of got me started writing the book. So I dove in, did the research for several years, and then actually started trying to organize it and putting it into a book.

[00:29:47] And then that's the book that eventually got published. 

[00:29:50] Jill: That's really fascinating too, because now I'm thinking, I wonder if there's an organization in New Jersey that does something similar that I could just out of curiosity like go look and I don't know find some other people's diaries and then it makes me think I don't really have diaries necessarily but I do have journals where I'll write things down and sometimes when I'm writing them.

[00:30:12] I don't think about the fact that there could be somebody a hundred years from now that could be reading this and being like, wow, look at Jill's life. Look at the things she thought about and the things she talked about, which some of it is probably a little crazy. So I don't know, but I don't do a lot of writing about my day to day life, you know, like, Oh, I picked up the kids from school today, things like that.

[00:30:33] I guess I don't really think to write and maybe now with technology, some of it is. It's in pictures. I take a lot of photographs and I take pictures almost every day of just like something, right? Something around the house that I'm working on or something the kids are doing. And so maybe that's going to be my journal that's left behind.

[00:30:52] It's going to be a lot of photos, but it does make me think how so much of who we are gets lost if we don't write these things down when it would be kind of nice if I had something I wish I had more. I do have my grandmother. She used to do this. It was like a notebook, right? Just like a spiral bound notebook.

[00:31:14] And she was funny because she would just open to any page and start writing. She didn't keep it in any order. Right? So like, there's like my First communion like what she made a lot of it was around parties and what food they made right so she would make this much roast beef and she made this much potato salad, and it was a beautiful day and the whole family was there, and then like the next page would be like Jill visited from college today and we made this food together and it's like.

[00:31:43] Why is there so much space in between? So it makes it a little hard when you're reading through it to kind of follow any patterns necessarily. And one day I did ask her about it. She was like, I don't know. I just opened a blank page and I just start to write. And I was like, why don't we start at the beginning and just make our way through.

[00:32:01] But a lot of it was that kind of There wasn't a lot of information other than the weather and who was at the party and what food she made, which that's still interesting to me. Like I still love to read through that and see what kind of food, because I'm a food person, but I wish there was more about who she was and what she thought and what she believed and like more about her, not just about.

[00:32:28] the day to day of like, I made 20 pounds of potato salad. 

[00:32:32] Sue: Well, and your grandmother or your mother who kept this diary? My grandmother. Your grandmother. You know, she was doing kind of by accident what just happened with Mary's diary because she wrote on these Tablets. And it's like pages came loose. And so we had all of these pages and it's like, okay, well, does this come before or after this one?

[00:32:54] And is this the same year? Because the other thing about her diary was she would put numbers for the days every day that she wrote, but she would only put the month on the first day and she would only put the year. On January 1st of the year. So it's like, that was part of the organizing it and formatting.

[00:33:14] It was trying to figure out is, okay, does this page come here? And if it doesn't, then it's like, okay, is it part of this year? It was quite the process to try and just get everything in the right order. And. When mom and I were working on it, we did the best that we could. We got to the point where it was like, I think this is as good as it's going to get.

[00:33:33] But as I was doing the research, I found places where, Oh no, clearly that entry does not belong here. It goes someplace else. And so I did some more reorganizing of it as I was doing the research for my book, because it became clear that, okay, we had some things in the wrong place. Even after I did that, I'm sure there are still things in the wrong place.

[00:33:51] And that's the thing about most diaries. From what I've seen is that when you write for yourself, you don't do those sorts of things. You don't make it explicit. Okay, it's this day, this month, this year. And with page numbers, it's like, okay, well this page comes after this page. And who is this person that I'm writing about?

[00:34:11] You don't write that kind of stuff because you know that stuff. And a hundred years later, somebody has to try and do the work to figure that out. Or it doesn't make sense. And it's, the diaries themselves are often very hard to read just because you don't have the context. You don't know who they're talking about.

[00:34:28] You don't know what's going on. So that would be the one thing anybody who's, you know, Writing a diary, if you think that maybe somebody somewhere down the road is gonna use this as a resource, it's like, include those details. 

[00:34:40] Jill: Yeah, yeah, it's true. I wonder what Mary would think. I'm trying to like put myself in her mind a little bit of like what she would think about the fact that in 2023, we're sitting here in totally different states, in totally different rooms, having a conversation about her and her life.

[00:35:00] To me, that. Something about that part of the story really fascinates me how she still is living on in a way, right? We're having a conversation about this woman and her life and her experiences and her death that she experienced and her grief and like all of these things and she's got no idea. Because when she wrote that diary, she was just making some notes for herself probably so that she could look back one day and be like, Oh yeah, I remember that happened that time when, yet here we are.

[00:35:32] And I just, I love that. 

[00:35:33] Sue: Interesting because one of the things that she wrote, and I put this as a Kind of like a quote at the beginning, and she wrote this April 7th of 1907. I hope that what I have written down in the pages of this journal will be of interest to those who may read them after the hand that penned them has ceased its labors.

[00:35:50] So it's like somewhere along the way she did think about that. Doesn't mean that she included any more of those details, but she did think about it as being a record. I have often thought it's like, okay, yeah, if she did know about this book, if she saw this book, I can just imagine where she would say, Oh, that's not right.

[00:36:08] That's not what that meant. That's not what I was doing. And I'm like, 

[00:36:11] Jill: Hey, I did the best I could. Yes. And it must have been so much work. It sounds like your mother typing it, trying to probably read and type. I mean, that in and of itself shows some real dedication, but even the way that the two of you did it.

[00:36:26] And I really liked that you and your mother did this together. I think that's a really sweet project to do. It 

[00:36:32] Sue: was. It was a wonderful project. I, unfortunately, she died before I donated it to the archive. She would have been so thrilled to know that it had gone to someplace that really appreciated it like that.

[00:36:46] And I think she would also have been really, really thrilled that the book got published too. The one thing, if I had started writing the book, just maybe even 10 years sooner, there would have been so many people in the family still alive that remembered some of these people. My dad, he wasn't alive when the book was published, but he was alive when I was doing the research and writing it.

[00:37:08] And there was a time where I got him and his first cousin on the phone and they started talking about their memories of some of these people. They never knew Mary because she died in 22 and my dad wasn't born until 29, but they knew their children. And they knew some of their children and they had stories that nothing that would have shown up at the diary because it was all after that, but they could tell stories about things that happened and who these people were.

[00:37:37] And if I'd had just done that 10 years sooner, there'd have been so many more of those people around. So that's the other thing about. Diaries and journals that people keep is that quite often nobody sees them until after the person dies and maybe not for many, many years after that. And by then it's like people kind of forget what's going on or people die and those resources aren't available anymore.

[00:37:59] And I used a lot of newspapers and official documents like death certificates, birth certificates, marriage certificates, but that doesn't tell the whole story. There's a point where she talked about one of her sons, and she said something like, I wish he would forget an old grudge and we'd be happy in family reunion.

[00:38:18] Everybody could be happy together. And it's like, so there's some sort of a story there, but it's like, that is so personal. That's not going to show up in a newspaper. And there's a section in the book that I call the mysteries because it was things that I just couldn't figure out. And that's one of the mysteries.

[00:38:33] It's like, okay, what's the story with this guy? I don't know. I'll never know. And had I done this sooner, maybe I could have talked to this guy's grandchildren or something that maybe knew something about why there was hard feelings in that part of the family. Yeah, it's too late now. That's the other thing is that diaries, they're nice, but you need to really get more information from people than you can get just with the diaries.

[00:38:57] And it's like, I think it's with the conversations like you had with your grandmother that really puts those things in context. And those things are precious. And that's history. It's your family history, but it's also just history of the time. And I think that's important to preserve. 

[00:39:12] Jill: Yeah. And it's kind of just in my head.

[00:39:14] I've tried to talk to my kids every once in a while about it, but again, they didn't even, well, my son met my grandmother. She was 94 when she died and he was six months old, but so like they met, but they didn't know each other. And so they don't really care about the stories quite as much and I definitely wonder too of how much of it I remember as accurately as I wish that I did, because our brains, human brains, we're kind of not great at remembering things.

[00:39:42] We fill in little parts along the way and, but God, I did, I loved hearing those stories when I was a kid. And I remember just laying in bed and she would rub my back and she would tell me these stories of growing up on the farm, like they were my bedtime stories, which they were my bedtime stories. I appreciate it.

[00:40:01] But yeah, now I'm like, what should I do with them? Because they're in the brain, at least as best as I can remember. So maybe I should, maybe I'll just record them. I'm good at talking better than writing. So maybe I'll just sit in one day and just record what I can remember. And it's probably not perfect, but it's better than nothing.

[00:40:20] Because at this point, I don't think really anybody, we have a Facebook group for that, like, That part of my family, right? The ones that grew up on the farm. So like the, at this point now, yeah, it's like the grandkids and all of us. So maybe I'm going to ask on there if anybody has any written anything. Is there anybody anywhere that has a diary or anything that anybody wrote?

[00:40:45] Because at this point, my mother is She's probably the oldest living, I guess she's the oldest living matriarch in her seventies. And she's got some of the stories, but there again, as life moves on, we're getting further and further away from the people that actually lived on that farm and had experienced it.

[00:41:08] So. 

[00:41:09] Sue: Yeah, when you're talking about you and your cousins getting together and talking about these stories, it's like, that's where the recording needs to happen, whether it's written or it's oral. And the nice thing about having cousins who have some of those same experiences is that you can compare notes and it's like, where you're not sure that, well, maybe I'm not remembering this correctly.

[00:41:28] They can remember it differently, even if they heard exactly the same thing. It's like you're saying, the human mind works the way that it works and it's not completely linear. It's linear. The sooner you can start recording those kinds of things, the greater the chances that that stuff is going to stick around.

[00:41:44] And having those conversations is really important, partially as a consequence of me writing this book, but also because it sparked conversations with my dad. I remember before he died, I would have conversations with him about, yeah, I remember this. What do you remember about this? And so we would compare our memories and that was really wonderful for me.

[00:42:06] That was a wonderful experience in terms of, okay, I have this memory and my dad has this memory. And it's like, how do those two things compare? And sometimes it was, yes, he remembered that incident when we could talk about that. And then there was another one that. Just made a really, really big impression on me and I mentioned it to him and he's like, no, he didn't remember that at all.

[00:42:27] The more of those kinds of conversations you could have, the more those memories stay alive, whether they get written down or not. 

[00:42:33] Jill: Well, hopefully we will inspire some people to have those conversations with their loved ones because you're right. We need to. We need to talk about those things. And yeah, ideally, yeah, record them in some manner, right?

[00:42:46] Everybody has a phone now, you got ways you can record it verbally. And it's something that can be cherished for many generations afterwards. And before we wrap up, can you just tell us specifically more about your book? If people want to find it? If they want to find you? How can they find you? 

[00:43:06] Sue: The title of the book is A Common Life, A Voice from the Progressive Era by Sue E.

[00:43:10] Burns. It's available on Amazon. It's so you can find it out there with that title and then Sue E. Burns as the author. Been doing publicity here locally. I go around to various places and do talks and presentations and sell copies of the book. So I'm selling books in our local bookstores, but nationally about the only place to get it would be Amazon.

[00:43:30] Jill: Okay. Well, I'll put a link in the show notes so that if anybody wants to find it, They easily can, but I really appreciate you coming on today. This was really interesting. I was really looking forward to this conversation once I connected with you because my own personal reasons, but I am fascinated with the differences in not that long of a time period.

[00:43:50] Life has changed a lot. And so I'm so glad that you have this. book that you created out of Mary's diary. And I feel like I know her a little bit now, which is kind of cool. 

[00:44:00] Sue: Yeah, I do too. If ever time machines are invented, I would love to be a fly on the wall and just find out more about what her life was really like, because I'm sure her diary was just a piece of it.

[00:44:13] Just a small snapshot of, of moments in her life. And it's like, I really would like to get to know her better. 

[00:44:20] Jill: Well, I'm glad that you have even this much. So thank you again for coming on today. I really appreciate it. Well, thank you for having me. I've really enjoyed having this conversation. It's been wonderful.

[00:44:30] Thank you for listening to this episode of Seeing Death Clearly. In next week's episode, I talk with Helen Bower. host of the Heart of Hospice podcast. Helen shares her 34 year journey as a nurse, focusing on her 15 year experience in end of life care. We talk about her therapy dog, Sunny, and their work as a hospice volunteer team.

[00:44:52] We also discuss the importance of honoring patients beliefs and identities without imposing our personal agendas. Helen's story offers insights into empathy, dignity, and the impact of human connection in end of life care. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or family member who might find it interesting.

[00:45:11] Your support in spreading the podcast is greatly appreciated. Please consider subscribing on your favorite podcast platform and leaving a five star review. Your positive feedback helps recommend the podcast to others. The podcast also offers a paid subscription feature that allows you to financially support the show.

[00:45:27] Your contribution will help keep the podcast advertisement free, whether your donation is large or small, every amount counts. is valuable. I sincerely appreciate all of you for listening to the show and supporting me in any way you can. You can find a link in the show notes to subscribe to the paid monthly subscription as well as a link to my Venmo if you prefer to make a one time contribution.

[00:45:48] Thank you and I look forward to seeing you in next week's episode of Seeing Death Clearly.