The Gloucester County, Virginia, Museum of History recently published a
family memoir that I edited. With the addition of minimal footnotes to
clarify names, places, and happenings, I was able to leave the text
unchanged. Fred Jones's "Sketches of Home Life in Virginia Before and After
the Civil War" comes across as a statement of the time when it was
written,1924, and provides valuable insights to this man and his community.
While racist in parts, it does provoke the modern reader to see how people
did respect each other. Jones's reactions to the Great War and the influenza
pandemic add a different dimension to his story. Had some of the language
been "cleaned up," how would we know what was standard behavior for a time
long gone. Interestingly, a memoir written by a man born a slave into Fred
Jones's mother's family was published in 1958 and contains many of the same
stories and in some cases using the same language. There are, of course,
also some different views of "how things were." You might want to read
Thomas Calhoun Walker's "Under the Honey Pod Tree," also about Gloucester
County.

Don't change a word of a diary, make your transcription clear and true, it
is a window to the past and there are few.

Barbara Farner

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