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Tuesday, October 29. 2024

Mrs. BD found, in a box of stuff in the basement, my great grandmother's journal of her trip to Egypt in 1908. 1908 handwriting is a little difficult to decipher. Elegant, but faded.

In the good old days, people journaled their travels. As I read it, they were in Paris, Munich, Italy (Stresa and Rome), Athens, Jerusalem, and Egypt. The Grand Tour with their kids.

Amused me that they stayed in the same hotel in Stresa (Grand Hotel Borromeo) that we did a few years ago. Our lad met us there from the train up from Rome. I recall we brought him one or two big jars of peanut butter, which he could not find in stores during his job in Italy. Then we all had some fun on hikes and trains. It did not all go well, but that's adventure.

Another cool thing with this find is that we are headed to Egypt in January, so it's timely.

Posted by Bird Dog in Travelogues and Travel Ideas at 13:43 | Comments (7) | Trackbacks (0)

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Did your great grandmother travel from America?

if so, did she mention the liners they traveled on?

#1 feeblemind on 2024-10-29 14:16 (Reply)

I recall we brought him one or two big jars of peanut butter, which he could not find during his job in Italy. Then we had some fun on trains.

When I worked and traveled in Latin America, I was quite content with the food there. Tortillas, at least in Guatemala, were a lot more tasty than in the US. Thick and tasted like CORN. Coffee in Colombia--sublime (Also a safe water source) Tropical fruit- ditto. Mangoes, which back then were not widely available in US markets the way they are now. Tomatoes- not the tasteless kind so often found in US markets. Chicken had more flavor than the mass-produced US variety. But I missed good old USA peanut butter.

That was quite a find, a 116 year old journal. You might consider posting a PDF page of your great-grandmother's journal, to compare the handwriting back then.

A childhood friend found, some 25 years after his mother died, a journal she had kept from ages 12-18. He turned journal excerpts into the foundation of a book about her life.

My paternal grandmother's family history, written 7 decades ago, had a fair amount of letters or stories written down from the olden days. My sister-in-law was able to improve on my grandmother's genealogy, due to today's online resources. In the '80s, my maternal grandmother put a lot of her memories down on tape. Current software made shifting the audio tape to MP3-MP4 and to text a piece of cake.

#2 Gringo on 2024-10-29 14:22 (Reply)

What a treasure! Digitize good copies of every page so everyone in the family can have it.

My wife's grandmother wrote a diary, with an entry almost every day from 1940 to 1980. She was a nurse during the war and married a farmer and lived a self sufficient lifestyle. In the 90's her daughter copied it all as a PDF file, 2200 pages. Makes "Little House on the Prairie" look like a coloring book. Her grandfather digitized all his pictures going back to the 20's when his father turned 640 acres of woodland into a farm up into the 80's. Again a great history of their family computerized so everyone could share it.

#3 OneGuy on 2024-10-29 17:33 (Reply)

Re: your great-grandmother's handwriting. Try making enlarged color copies of the pages. That leaves room for you to print in small letters underneath as you work through the more difficult words. Color copies work better on faded ink.

#4 HH on 2024-10-29 21:29 (Reply)

What a wonderful gift!

#5 PCBRIG on 2024-10-30 08:14 (Reply)

Scan it, and software will make the fading issues go away in a snap. You're lucky to have found it. I recently found my great-grandmother's bonnet, I think it was her wedding bonnet, still in the box. The box had been covered with newspaper, and then a layer of decorative paper (as was the custom). Reading through the visible news clippings was a treat - it helped me date it to 1897 +/-.

#6 Aggie on 2024-10-30 11:03 (Reply)

Please transcribe it and post it on line. That's what I did with my grandfather's WWI diary. (See homepage.)

At the very least, make scanned copies and store them elsewhere. You have a treasure to protect.

#7 Codfanglers (Link) on 2024-10-31 08:47 (Reply)

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Tuesday, October 29. 2024

Lost, but found