When 27-year-old Georgina Barrett Devlin began keeping a personal diary in 1852, she had no idea what significant changes she was about to see in the world around her, let alone that her great-great granddaughter would publish her thoughts on those changes 159 years later.
It all started when Kay Mounger Jones received a brown, hardcover ledger book nearly 60 years ago from her grandmother, Georgina Mounger. The book contained hand-written thoughts and stories composed by Jones’ great-great-grandmother, Georgina Barrett Devlin, who lived in Winona and Yazoo City from the mid-1800s through the early 20th century.
Devlin came from a well-educated and prosperous English family. Her father, a British attorney, brought the family to the United States from London when Devlin was 10 years old. After a short stint in Canada, she spent the rest of her life in the area in and around the Mississippi Delta. She regularly chronicled her life experiences.
“I knew from the beginning that I wanted to preserve the diary,” Jones said. “It’s so interesting. I love how she discusses issues related to her time, such as social movements and the education of her children.”
Jones and her brother, Greenwood attorney Whit Mounger, have always been interested in family history..
“I love history, and when I come across an interesting factoid, I call Kay,” Mounger said.
The two come from a long line of writers who passed down historical facts through writing.
“We have a multitude of family diaries and letters,” Mounger said. “We’re fortunate to come from a family that kept things and wrote them down. Most of our great-great-grandmother’s writing was about the day-to-day stuff at home, but it’s those little things about the past that make up valuable knowledge today.”
When Jones’ grandmother gave her the hardcover book, she thought that was all of the written diary that was left. She then found out that more notebooks existed on a family plantation in Yazoo City, where Devlin spent her later years and composed much of her writing.
“Whit made arrangements for us to meet this cousin, who now lives in the house, and we discovered eight more volumes of the diary in the attic,” Jones said.”When we found out more parts of the diary existed, it was like opening up a gold mine. I knew then that we’d come so far with this that we better publish it.”
It takes much dedication to write in a diary every day, and though Devlin skips a day every now and then, she’s consistant in her writing.
The various notebooks in which Devlin describes day-to-day life are quite dated. A few of the pages are moth-eaten, and the yellow paper tears easily. But flipping though the pages is like turning back the hands on a clock.
“She writes about everything — from riding on a stage coach to the horrors of the Civil War to seeing an aviator and riding in an automobile for the first time,” Jones said.
To Jones, the most interesting story concerns how her great-great-grandmother weathered through the war-torn South with three young children during the Civil War.
“She vividly describes making clothing for soldiers and spending a night in hiding with her children from Yankee soldiers in the woods near their home,” Jones said.
“She also read a lot, and she describes books that she read and her thoughts pertaining to social issues and changes.”
Devlin was quite the business woman. She was widowed early, but she made ends meet by keeping up with prices and managing rental property.
While the diary serves as a history buff’s dream come true, transcribing it was no easy task.
“She used a lot of words that we don’t use anymore, especially words related to clothing,” Jones said. “I would see a word I didn’t recognize and just guess at what it was. I would type it into Google and the word would be right. I had to go through and make a lot of footnotes explaing what the words are at the bottom of the pages.”
Some of the pages were also torn and badly faded, making reading difficult.
“Publishing this diary was inportant,” Jones said. “It serves as a reference guide to people who are interested in history, particular Southern history and women’s studies.”
Mounger agrees on the importance of the published work.
“We’re fortunate to have an account of our family’s history, and the general public can learn a lot about life in general during this time period by simply reading the account of this one family,” he said. “This diary has taught me a lot about history, and I appreciate my great-great-grandmother’s writing.”
The published diary, “The Diary of a Southern Lady: Georgina Francis Barrett Devlin 1852-1912,” is availabe at Turnrow Book Co. in Greenwood.
nContact Beth Thomas at 581-7233 or bthomas@gwcommonwealth.com.
