About seventeen years have been spent so far, researching people and places mentioned in Lorette’s diaries - online genealogy sites, census data, books from this period, maps & atlases, cemeteries, and searching local historical archives - in an attempt to illustrate a backdrop to Lorette's life and the individual stories of each person and place mentioned in her diary. Since 2003 the internet has been an invaluable resource to do this, especially Ancestry.com.
My research was also aided by the discovery of an 1854 map of Genesee County that shows head-of- household persons who owned land in the county at that time.
Together, these resources have allowed me to locate information on thousands of people in the diaries, as well as the many places and events described in its pages.
As I accumulated information, I started footnoting diary entries mostly at first to remind myself who Lorette was talking about or what she was talking about, as my plan was to transcribe the diaries as exactly as written – misspellings, punctuation, incomplete sentences, and all. But as time went by, I started footnoting anything I thought sounded unusual or different. In 1855 alone, there are 306 footnotes.
After you read the first month of Lorette’s diary, you may notice there aren’t any footnotes. That is because once 2020 arrived, I decided to create a website for the translated diaries, and footnotes have been replaced by Tooltips. So rather than go someplace else in the document to read the footnote, all you have to do is hover over an underlined word and the “footnote” pops up.