About a dozen years ago I found a 1917 diary in a south Lansing, MI flea market. It was a lot of money but I was very intrigued and paid $15 for the diary. The author was a young student teacher named Helen Korngold of St Louis, MO. She was a vibrant, intelligent woman with strong family ties. I felt I knew Helen from her diary, and did genealogy research to find out more about her. I have her family tree on ancestry.com.
Helen Sarah Korngold Herzog
I made a series of small, page like quilts that included scanned images of her diary pages, and the quilt appeared at the Women's Historical Center as part of a small quilt show.
After all these years, I have finally found out what happened to Helen and how her diary came to be in Lansing! She showed up on another family tree on ancestry.com. I had all the information up to the late 1930s, but this tree had a spouse and death date and place.
In 1936 she was teaching in a St. Louis high school. In 1940 she appears in a Ithica, NY city directory married to Frtiz Herzog, who became a well known mathematician. By 1945 they were in East Lansing and Fritz was a professor at Michigan State University. He has a Wikipedia page!
Helen died at age 90 in 1988, and Fritz died in 2001 at age 98. Because they married late in life, they had no children and the diary was likely sold off with other personal items. And so I found the diary shortly after, and read it, and Helen, at least for me, was alive again.
Growing up I loved biographies. And as a young adult started to enjoy reading diaries, including Samuel Pepys, which I have read in its entirety. I kept a diary starting in junior high through high school, and off and on throughout my early adulthood. I find diaries fascinating.
I had once hoped to find a family member who would want the diary. In the past I have tracked down heirs and sent them ephemera or letters that were in my grandfather's papers. I feel that everything has a proper home. Now, it appears the diary is mine and some day I will donate it to its proper resting place.
How marvellous that you were able to find out so much about her. Back in the fifties I went to the Commercial department of Portsmouth Municipal College [England] which was next door to the birthplace of Charles Dickens. I remember raving to my father about the Dickens book I was reading, asked if he had read it, and he replied, Read it? I lived it! Regards from June in New Zealand
ReplyDeleteLovely story, June! That had to be so amazing to hear!
ReplyDeleteNancy, I think you should edit this journal, write an introduction that contextualizes it and points up its imporantance as a cultural document, and publish it, even if you have to do it personally. Be sure it is placed in relevant archival libraries, including those related to education. We take for granted the lives of women of our own century, and we shouldn't. If you don't want to do it---and this woman is YOUR "relative"--- then find a grad student or college senior in need of a thesis topic. Don't let Helen's voice die. She took the time to record the events of her life. Don't you think she was speaking to the future as well as to herself? I always find it sad that such things are sold off by family members. Don't say "good-bye" to Helen.
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