I first heard about the existence of an 1800’s Shepard diary from Paul Spiers, a cousin of Roy J Shepard, Jr. Paul was born in the Shepard homestead in 1918, and while visiting this area in 2003, he stopped by our house and introduced himself to me. He was a great storyteller, and that day he told me that there was a family diary written by a Shepard girl named Lorette Shepard, dating back to the mid 1800's. It was transcribed by her granddaughter, Lucile Hamilton Carr. Lucile’s son, Steve, told me that his mother used to sit in the office on the third floor of the CL Carr Department store on Main Street, Batavia, and copy entries from the original diary into stenographer’s notebooks (6 x 9 inch top spiral-bound notebooks that stenographers use to take shorthand). Lucile let Paul borrow the notebooks so he could make a "Xerox" copy for himself. But time had gotten away from him and he hadn't yet organized the thousands of copies he had made. This piqued my interest, and so I offered to arrange them in order by year and put them in a notebook for him.
Soon, packages containing thousands of copied pages began to arrive in the mail. Flipping through the sheets of paper, I realized my goal of organizing the diary was more complicated than I had thought. Many of the pages were out of order. Each diary entry was dated, but only with the day and month - the year only appeared at the beginning and end of each year. Also, some of the photocopied pages were too light to read and had to be set aside.
That winter, I began to read the decipherable pages and laid them out by year on the floor of my living room, the rest were put into a separate pile to be dealt with later. The more I read, the more I became acquainted with Lorette and her family and friends. After several readings of the entire 51-year diary, I was able to fit all the pages in the year in which they belonged (it helped that Lorette mentioned her age on her birthdate every year – November 3rd).
In the end, the process was more than mere collating. I was piecing together a puzzle of this woman's life -- a life that until now neither Bob nor I knew anything about. In the process, I began to wonder - who are all these people Lorette mentions in her diary? My curiosity launched the second phase of this project, which entailed researching the numerous names, places, and historical events documented on each page.
