Digging into the Past: Researching the Diary

When I first started researching the diary entries, I had this idea to see how much information I could find without leaving my house or paying anything. With the internet, there is an amazing amount of info available but it didn't take me long to give up on my initial plan!

So, how did I find the information I put into the book?

Talking with Family

I'm descended from Mary on my father's side. At the time I started researching (sometime in 2017), Dad was still alive. He was born in 1929, after Mary died in 1922, so he never knew her but he did know some of her children and their children and he attended many Mosher and Briggs family reunions. Sometimes I would be visiting him and we'd start talking about what I was digging into for the book. He would think back about something he remembered. Then he would call his first cousin, Eldon Stall, and the two of them would reminisce and compare memories on speaker phone while I took notes and mostly listened. At other times, I also spoke with Eldon's sister Audrey by phone and Dad's sister, Beverly. Aunt Bev also had a lot of family photos and helped with identifying people in photos.

Some of the things these family members told did end up in the book, although most of what they remembered came from long after Mary had died. I treated anything they said as I would what was written in the diary...something to be researched and corroborated as much as possible.

Genealogy Websites

I started out with free trial subscriptions to most of the common websites; FamilySearch, Ancestry, MyHeritage. FamilySearch (collected and hosted by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) is always free. The others offer trial subscriptions for varying lengths of time. I also discovered that libraries sometimes have subscriptions that I could use. The Des Moines Public Library had a subscription to MyHeritage for a while that I could log onto from home. I actually paid for subscriptions to Ancestry a time or two. I found that while a lot of the information was the same, each source had some info that the others didn't so it was helpful to check all three.

For genealogy websites, I focused specifically on public records...census data, birth/death/marriage certificates. Many users of these sites create family trees. I specifically did not include these family trees in searches. I found too many errors to rely on them. If I got stuck, might treat the info contained in them like clues, but not as facts until I corroborated them somewhere else.

Historic Newspapers

For much of my time writing the book, I had a subscription to Newspapers.com. Some libraries also had newspaper archive subscriptions that I used, but they tended to be restricted to certain geographies. My Newspapers subscription gave me much broader access. Newspapers didn't always cover smaller, local newspapers, though. I found that some county historical societies were better for those. 

The Warren County Historical Society was very helpful for information about Mary's family of origin. Indeed, that's where I found Mary's obituary, which I couldn't find in Newspapers. Her family came to Warren County in the 1850s and many of them still lived in the area during the time Mary kept her diary. Local papers also had more "society" news about who visited whom and the Warren County papers often corroborated when Mary's diary said she made the trip to visit family or attend funerals or celebrations.

While much of what Mary put in her diary was not the sort of thing that made it to newspapers, she wrote about things that she read in her local paper. She subscribed to one of the Des Moines papers and I used her references in the diary to check newspapers from around that time to confirm whether I had diary entries assigned to the correct dates. For example, if she wrote about record-breaking cold temperatures or a particularly bad train wreck, I could cross-reference the info with newspaper accounts.

I also used newspapers to figure out things that seemed puzzling, initially. When she wrote about going on a "milk diet" I searched for that phrase in newspapers from that year. Those articles filled in gaps in my knowledge about exactly what a milk diet was and why people would follow it. I could look at ads of the day to see what things cost or articles on how diseases were understood and treated.

Old Books

This category wasn't as useful as some of the others, but some books were key. When my dad died, I found a book (Elsie Venner by Oliver Wendel Holmes) which Mary had written her name in that was given to my grandfather (Dad's dad). This inscription answered one question I had...did Mary go by "Mary" or "Mary Ann." She signed the book "Mary A Briggs" which would seem to indicate that she went by Mary.

I also found a book in my parents' house called Dr Chase's Last and Complete Receipt Book and Household Physician, published in 1909. I used it figure out old names for diseases like "dropsy" (fluid retention or edema) or "Bright's disease" (nephritis or kidney disease), or how the diseases were understood and treated. Since the book and Mary's diary were contemporary, it really helped understand what was thought at the time

Maps and Other Resources

University of Iowa Library and other online sites have some historic maps. I was mostly interested in plat maps that showed who owned land when. This allowed me to place people Mary wrote about as neighbors, if they owned land nearby.

The Dana Grefe Collection was extremely useful for the sections of the book about trains. The collection includes many maps, train schedules, photos and other memorabilia that helped to understand what Mary wrote about her train trips.

The South Dakota State Hospital museum was very helpful in shedding some light on Leroy King's committal and life there. I went there to take a photo of his grave-site. I really wanted side-by-side photos of where he is actually buried in South Dakota and his name next to Lillie's on a tombstone in Iowa.

Deeds & Court Documents

It was extremely fortunate for me that Dallas County has extensive historical documents digitized and searchable online. I was able to find deed records related to land sales, which allowed me to trace the ownership of Mary's farm from original land patent until it was sold after her death. It also provided information about the number of acres and amount of money that changed hands as well as who was buying/selling.

The Iowa State Historical Society has many, many records on microfilm that include some of the info available from the counties as well as other records that don't overlap the county information. With this information, I was able to find details of wills and probates. It's also where I found most of the information about Lillie's guardianship of her husband after he was committed.