JOURNALS ARE ORDINARY, IMPORTANT

DAILY PRESS

The new year is a good time to begin a daily journal. Remember, everything you write is significant.

The only way anyone will be remembered by descendants is through written accounts. Without a journal, you may be recalled faintly by great-grandchildren, but following generations will know nothing about your beliefs, hopes, accomplishments or daily routine.

Without a diary or journal, the individual passes into oblivion, perhaps leaving bare information in public records. Does it matter? How much it does may be measured by how much each of us wishes for written accounts, diaries and journals of our ancestors. Sadly, their days and personal ways are only conjecture, lost because they supposed it too ordinary to record.

A familiar response to the suggestion of writing a journal is that one's daily life is not important. What is there to write about but getting up in the morning, going to work, doing the laundry, buying groceries and turning lights out after the kids?

If this really were all there is to write about, it should be written. This generation has shown great interest in how the last generation did laundry, obtained and prepared food and polished the glass chimney of a kerosene lamp - that wonderful invention that ended the necessity to harvest bayberries for making candles. No one can predict which journal items have potential historical significance.

Among priceless journals are those of the great explorers Christopher Columbus and Captain John Smith. They made maps and descriptions of oceans, rivers, islands, continental boundaries, colonial governmental systems, native peoples and new climes with new animals and plants. Columbus provided guides for sea routes which were followed for hundreds of years. Smith's accounts of Virginia and his travels - in the Chesapeake and its rivers and New England coasts - provide the backbone for analysis and development of colonial history.

Both ignored such ordinary matters as places and dates of their own births; neither included a word about his own childhood nor anything about parents. In his will, Columbus provided means to maintain the Columbo name in Genoa, but nowhere named it his birthplace.

Smith was about 25 when he presided over the colony at Jamestown. He wrote of war experiences in the Netherlands at age 16, of sailing on a pirate ship in the Mediterranean, of military exploits in Turkey, but nothing of where he was or how he felt as a child when his father died.

Smith's writings reveal something of the mind of Powhatan the Indian king, but nothing of his origin.

When Captain Newport invited Powhatan to Jamestown to receive protection and a copper crown from King James of England, Powhatan said, "I also am a king and this my land...(Newport) is to come to me, not I to him, nor yet to your fort, neither will I bite at such a bait...I can revenge my own injuries... and as for (tales of) salt waters beyond these mountains, it is false."

The gap of missing information about Powhatan may have seemed unimportant. Had he come east from western lands conquered by the Spanish? How did he obtain rule of the Chesapeake area?

Additional records about famous persons are continually sought, but lifestyles among ordinary people are of great interest. Archaeologists, genealogists, historical and medical researchers all grasp the small shard, the bone, shreds of a document, trying to learn more about everyday lives of people who lived and died before us. Perhaps the lesson becomes more pointed; mundane matters.

The life of every person matters. No one should feel that a personal journal is not valuable or necessary. Each individual is a part of a generation. Without the life stories of individuals, history is diminished.

A journal may be written as a lifelong letter to a grandchild, a focus which may help avoid pretense of style or word usage. The story will be of yourself and the others who live in your house. Include a sketch of the house and give its location and when it was built, how many rooms and what is in them, who visits there. Tell of meals and who prepares them, how leisure time is spent, purchases and appearance of shops. The clothing children wear, toys they like, costs. What items are considered to be expensive? Report on changes in your lifestyle since you were a child.

Your opinions matter, and they may greatly change during years of daily writing. Define your religious beliefs and opinions of right and wrong, books and magazines enjoyed, schools attended and favorite subjects.

Ensure preservation by placing copies of personal records in the hands of dependable people. The value of daily accounts increase with each decade. If your journal remains for a century - and there's no reason it shouldn't - it will be priceless.

* Write to Rollings, c/o Daily Press, 7505 Warwick Blvd., MP 1203, Newport News VA 23607.

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