The journal has seen better days. Years of being passed down from person to person have left it discolored, brittle, and faded. Imagine the old paper you tried to recreate in the seventh grade by soaking paper in tea or coffee and burning the edges. Many pages are so fragile that just trying to turn them will cause another small piece to flake off. For whatever reason, the first few pages are the worst. In some cases I just could not make out what Adaline wrote. So in the first few entries, there may be sentences that don’t flow like you think they should. But once we get further along, that rarely happens.
There are only a few other differences between the actual journal and what is written here. One is punctuation. She seemed to write out all her thoughts without using periods or capital letters, just little spaces. I added punctuation to make it easier to read. There are some differences in grammar that I left alone. For example, I just like how she writes “to day” instead of “today.”
I will also try to spell names correctly and consistently. Just like we often spell names based on how they sound, Adaline did the same. Sometimes a person’s name was spelled differently each time she wrote it! (I don’t know many people who could spell L’hommedieu. Lhomideu was not that far off!) By trying to spell them correctly, hopefully people looking for specific ancestors will be able to find them.
A Burch Tree 