Diaries and Letters

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When  Annie Cooper Boyd was just fifteen years old in 1880, she started keeping a diary in a small school notebook.  She declared then that she would keep a record of “my good and bad times, my ways, my thoughts, my troubles, my experiences, any daily occupation and so forth.” And so she did. For the next thirty years Annie kept a diary, sometimes making entries several days in a row, and sometimes months would pass between her recorded entries. She wrote in traditional diaries, notebooks, ledgers, and whatever was available at the time. Her diaries, a unique and illuminating record of a young woman on the cusp of the twentieth century, reveal her appreciation of nature, her efforts to grapple with her place in the world, her devotion to her parents and family, her lifelong dedication to painting and sketching, and her love for her husband, John Boyd, and their two children, Nancy and Cooper. Before Annie died in 1941, she put all her diaries in an old sea chest in the attic where her daughter Nancy Willey found them years later. Nancy set about the task of transcribing them and preparing excerpts for publication, where they first appeared in the 1986 book Private Pages: Diaries of American Women (1830s to 1970s).