Family Connections

Diaries

The two principal sources of daily life in a community were newspaper clippings and personal diaries. The Daily Gleaner, Fredericton, and the Telegraph Journal, Saint John, carried a regular feature of social columns submitted by a community correspondent. Two that we knew of were Bea Higgs covered Pemberton Ridge and Forest City and Nell Farrell looked after Eel River. The others are unknown. The papers did not give the submitters a byline.

The diaries were brief summations of daily events. Births, deaths, weddings, visitors, weather, life on a farm or woods work. None contained any negative or derogatory remarks about neighbors or family.

Sarah Ann Maxan Gould (1869-1943), mother of Bea Higgs, kept a diary from 1931 to 1937. If she had one prior to 1931, it has not come to light. Her's is rather notable for the detailed description of her husband's illness and passing during the summer of 1933. One can feel her pain.

Beatrice Gould was born in Forest City in 1887 on the property later owned by Harve and Martha Boone. Their neighbors, up the road, were George and Maude Boone, Houghtons, Pattersons, Harvey's and Harve Boone. Sometime after 1901, they moved to Pemberton Ridge and Harve moved into their old place. She started keeping a journal at an early age. An aged notebook, began in early 1900, tattered and yellow with time, is the earliest available of the tablets, notebooks, diaries, and scrapbooks she kept over her lifetime. Bea loved large groups of people around her and never missed a chance to travel somewhere by whatever means, horse and buggy, car, pulp truck, gravel truck, school bus or neighbor's car. She never learned to driver herself. Bea died Jun 10, 1983, at age of 96. Whether she kept writing in her diary until then is unknown. Quite likely she did. During her lifetime, she kept picture albums, scrapbooks and diaries. Most of them survived until 2023. In December of that year Denny, who inherited the house of his deceased parents, Carl and Bertha, started cleaning some "old" things from a closet. These "old" things were Bea's diaries, pictures, scrapbooks that were thrown into the wood furnace and burned. Had I known you wanted them, he said, you could have had them all.
Such items may prove boring to most people, but they provide a realistic snapshot of community life in days gone by.

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Stella Boone Gillispie was born in 1900, a daughter of George and Maude Boone. She and her husband, Clint Gillispie, lived in Forest City, taking over the farm when her father gave up farming due to age. They had one daughter, Jean, who passed away in 2023 at age of 96. Stella occasionally used a simple code for a word in her diary, i.e. toilet, for example. The code is show below.

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