Fearless Females: March 8

The Accidental Genealogist is running her annual “Fearless Females” month of March. I’m so happy to be joining in, although admittedly a little late. I will attempt to catch up before the end of the month. If you want to see her blog and prompts you can look here: http://www.theaccidentalgenealogist.com/2015/02/back-for-sixth-year-fearless-females.html

The prompt for March 8:

“Did one of your female ancestors leave a diary, journal, or collection of letters? Share an entry or excerpt.”

No diary or journal that I have found. The closest I can get is a series of letters my grandmother, Peggy (Barbour) Straughen, sent to her mother (Pauline Coleman) during her first year of marriage. For me, someone who essentially grew up with access to email, and later Facebook and text messaging, it is so odd to see space in a letter used to talk about things like what meat was on sale at the grocery store in 1958. I don’t have the collection of letters but my mother has them and has been spending the last few months typing them and sending nicely printed copies to relatives that might be interested. It seems like she really embraced the domestic life in her marriage. A lot of lines in her letters are devoted to discussion of cooking and cleaning. I’ll try to post some excerpts if I get access to the collection.