What I’ve learned from reading over 10,000 diaries | Sally MacNamara Ivey | TEDxVienna

[Music] i read diaries for a living other people's diaries and in the last 35 years i've read over ten thousand vintage diaries and i'm often asked how did you ever get started doing this well there was actually two reasons the first is my father john mcnamara i knew very little about my father but one thing i did know is life was full of mystery and deep heartache he and my mother divorced when i was just a little girl and i never really saw much of them after that other than a few scheduled visits but on those scheduled visits my dad always told my sister and i just how much he loved us eventually we moved away and then when i was 13 years old we were just totally died his sister sally my name's sake was so distraught she took all his precious possessions and she placed them in a trunk and she said no one will ever open this trunk and that's when my heart broke and then years later painfully i would learn that my father had taken his own life so for 50 years that trunk has stayed hidden my aunt sally she passed away 10 years ago and that trunk with my father's untold stories in it it's vanished and so i was desperate desperate to know more about this man who gave me life yet he took his own life and because of that trunk i vowed that this will never happen again not in my own life perhaps i could stop it from happening in the lives of those who have gone before me so years later i get married and i have two children and i am given the first diary in my collection and it was my great grandmother's 1931 diary her name was mary wood and they called her little toot this is her on the far left she's the little short with a tiny one peeking out she writes all about sailing to europe with the gold star mothers these group of women these are mothers who had lost their sons during world war one and they were sailing to europe to pay tribute to them my great-grandmother lost her son william he was stationed on board the uss cyclops which went down in the bermuda triangle in 1918 and neither the ship or the crew were ever found so in 1987 i began what became a lifelong mission and that was to preserve the untold stories of others but little did i know that this journey i was about to embark on would change my life in the most powerful way and all because of the handwritten word so the woman that began the gold star mothers was grace darlene siebold and she herself had a son during world war one that she lost and it was then that she wrote these words self-contained grief is self-destructive which brings me to human emotions and diaries in the 35 years i've been reading diaries from different walks of life and different generations i've come to realize that human emotions are timeless and i want to share with you three passages from three different diaries in my collection so in 1792 sir charles middleton who was then an admiral in the royal navy loses the love of his life his wife margaret they were teenagers when they met in the 1730s on board a ship and they never got married until 20 plus years later because her family disapproved of the relationship charles and margaret were strong abolitionists against the slave trade and they worked very closely with one of its leaders william wilberforce so when his precious wife died charles picked up a blank diary and he began to write about her death and his deep grief this entry was written about a year after she died sunday september 1st 1793 i felt very gloomy of late on account of the loss of my companion my friend my wife oh lord thou knowest best what is good for me there are many places and things here that remind me daily of my loss and i have many hours to myself to think i am frequently low when i consider how much i am left alone by the departure of my dear companion and at times i forget that it is by god's will now fast forward to the year 1927 a young man by the name of john a 32 year old man living in texas loses a love of his life his wife lillian and their baby girl all of which happened during childbirth john fought in world war one and this is where he meets lillian while in france in 1919 after the war they get married moved back to the united states and in 1926 is when lillian becomes pregnant but also in 1926 is when lillian passes away as does the baby and that's when john picked up his blank journal and he wrote all about his debilitating grief this entry was written about three months or more after the two of them died march 31st 1927 perhaps i should be in bed i guess i need some rest i've been lost in the sea of memory again this evening and the loneliness of life the emptiness within my heart has been urging me on to search and search for that which might heal it again happiness oh it is indeed a word of mystery i cannot write of things of life that bring the joy of real happiness because i am not happy now fast forward to the year 2008 a 51 year old woman is living in a small oregon town raising four teenagers with her husband of 14 years he is a man she would refer to as an angel sent by god and it's a beautiful fall sunny day and in the distance she hears this knock at her front door and soon that sunny day would turn into the darkest day she has ever known for they proceeded to tell her that her husband has been killed in a construction accident well that woman was me and in that darkness that would consume me i picked up my blank diary and in the span of two years i would write 12 grief diaries and those words of graces never rang so true as they did during those years of my grief self-contained grief is self-destructive and so i began to write october 27 2008 two more days and it will be a month since my incredible husband passed away into the loving arms of jesus i'm going to try and keep this journal so that one day i can look back on it when my heart isn't so full of pain and to see how god was with me there's a power in the hand written word a power in your stories and when you write your stories down on the pages of a blank diary little do you know just how powerful those words can be until sometimes years and years later six years ago i had the privilege of being a very small part of getting one mother's 1944 diary back to her children her name was mary jane and you see in 2012 mary jane was diagnosed with alzheimer's so when bridget her daughter received the diary and started reading her mother's 1944 entries back to her mary jane's memory came back to those events in those times written 70 years earlier bridget said to me sally for a brief moment in time we had our mother back a brief moment and not only her memories but her feelings too it's truly an amazing study of yourself when you keep a diary and then you re-read it years later but i would say if you do go easy on yourself because as we all know emotions are true deep and raw they're just who we are the good and the bad and i tell you the one of the greatest things that got me through those years of grief was reading diaries grief diaries from people from the past i thought oh if they can make it through i can make it through i am not alone you are not alone we are not alone 1792 1927 1944 2008 and 2021 emotions are timeless aren't they now i don't always read diaries that are just full of sorrow and grief it's so exciting for me when i pick up a diary and i read it for the first time i have no idea what i'm about to discover or what adventure i'm about to go on for instance i have 12 diaries written by a man by the name of jerome king they were written in the 1870s and 1880s jerome was a civil war vet turned baggage master for a railway he wrote of train wrecks and train robberies and preparing dead bodies for travel but he also handled the luggage of some incredible people like circus performers and outlaws and prisoners and some very famous people too like buffalo bill cody and the famous poet and playwright oscar wilde and for me it just doesn't get any better than that well actually it does because jerome's best friend was a one-armed butcher and this is real life and i thought if there ever is a movie or a die or i mean a novel written by about him i think it needs to be titled jerome king baggage master and the one armed butcher and then i have a diary i can't mention his name because i don't know if he's out there right now it's written in the 1990s and it was written by a young man who decided to take a trip to mexico with a bunch of his buddies he actually took several trips while in mexico and that's because the group decided to take psychedelic mushrooms with him along the way and he wrote a diary the entire time so you can imagine what those entries are like in fact i want to share one of them with you so skip thought i was god today and i told him i was and skip says what say you god and i said walter walter where did that come from walter you worry too much just have fun now that doesn't quite make sense does it but it might if you're on psychedelic mushrooms is saying well i want to leave you with a glimpse into the almost unbelievable you know that saying by mark twain truth is stranger than fiction well in the 35 years i've been reading and researching diaries i've had several situations that have happened to me that fit perfectly with that saying and i must share one of my favorites with you now so 16 years ago i was reading a diary about a voyage to europe that took place on july 13 1938 this is the day it started it was written by a 12 year old girl by the name of alice bentley alice wrote all about pulling out of the dock in the new york harbor and passing the statue of liberty and sailing on this great ship called the normandy also in the diary were black and white photos that alice had taken she took photos of new york photos of the ship and then she took this one photo this is a little gal she met a friend she met on board her name is barbara whitting as you can see barbara has her own camera around her neck and is standing on the deck of the ship and then a couple days later alice writes this july third fifteenth nineteen thirty eight today we played tennis i made friends with a girl my age her name is barbara whitting well after i researched this diary and uh i ended up selling it to a collector in florida my work went on buying and selling diaries and it wasn't unusual for me to get two to three diaries a week in the mail ten years pass and it's the year 2015. i open up a diary or a box that was just delivered and out of this box is this diary and i started reading it and at the top of the first page it says ss normandy and then there are several pages of autographs that they had collected and then the diary entries start and at the top of the diary entries is the date july 13th 1938 and the name barbara whitting and my memory i started going wait a minute didn't i sell a diary and i think it was about the normandy and i think it was written in 1938 by a young girl named alice i sold it years ago but i think she mentioned a barbara and then i kept reading and as barbara wrote she talked about pulling away from the dock in the new york harbor passing the statue of liberty and sailing on the great ship called the normandy so those two young girls were standing on this deck of the same ship that left the new york harbor on july 13 1938 not knowing each other quite yet taking photos and writing in two separate diaries and those two diaries ended up with me at two different moments in my life 10 years apart and then i kept reading and as i turned the pages i came to an entry barber wrote july 15 1938 betty and i went in swimming and played deck tennis with another girl i also know her sister who is 10 in the very intelligent type the other one's name is alice their last name bentley they are good swimmers then i kept reading and as i turned the page barbara took a picture everybody meet alice the author of the first diary i sold 16 years ago i don't know if those two girls ever met each other and it took me two years but i got alice's diary back and by some great miracle they're together now you know there is nothing nothing like real life your life our memories are good they're not great our memories are partial they're not complete our memories are not in exact they embellish but diary entries written at the very moment of conception that is real life as real as the author sees it at that point in time and this is the next generation of diary keepers two of my four grandchildren peyton and parker so what i do i think everybody needs to keep a diary oh my goodness yes if not only to put your feelings and your thoughts from here and here and place them here but also for the sake of history and the sake of your family because your life is important your untold story is important and don't ever let anybody tell you that it's not because it is there's another saying that we've all heard that i love everybody has a story but i want to add to that everybody has a story and one worthy of sharing and what better place to place that story than on the pages of a diary because i know of at least 10 000 people's untold stories that are worthy of telling thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 253,653

Keywords: English, History, Journalism, Learning, Life, Research, Self, TEDxTalks

Id: CIopFzbIPJw

Length: 18min 27sec (1107 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 07 2022