17-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Thursday, March 21, 1912: On the first day of spring the ground is white with snow. My seventeenth birthday dawned this morning. Tried to make the most of it. I received two presents. I am staying up later this evening to study longer, also want to see the passing of my birthday.
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Happy Birthday, Grandma!
The previous year when Grandma turned 16, she wrote:
I hereby truthfully resolve to be a better and more useful girl in the future than I have been in the past, and may this birthday resolution never be broken.
I sign myself,
Helena Muffly,
Mar. 21, 1911
I wonder if Grandma remembered her resolution—and if she felt like she’d kept it over the course of the year.
Filed under: Other Tagged: | 100 years ago, 1912, diary, family history, hundred years ago
I wonder what the two presents were and who were they from? Too bad she didn’t realize how curious we would be 100 years from then!
Ah she’s on the cusp of her adult life. little could she imagine all of us following her trail.
I often wonder how she’d feel if she knew we were all reading her diary a hundred years later. Based on what the girl in the diary was like, I think that she’d find it humorous that we care about her mundane life–yet be pleased.
Based on what the elderly Grandmother that I remember was like, I think that she’d just smile but at the same time feel a little proud that someone cared about her life.