My Diaries! What would you do?

Ohh I think keep them as a lovely surprise for your children, I’m sure they will thoroughly delighted to read your words & thoughts.

Not quite a diary, but my mother bought a A4 blank page book with an attractive hard cover and wrote down all she remembered of her childhood, addressing it to her DGC. It makes fascinating reading. She then passed it to me and said it was my turn. I’ve typed a lot on the computer for my DGC but now have to write it. In writing. In the book. Which has no lines. I’m really not used to handwriting! But once done I get to pass it on to one of my DC. It’s amazing how much we’ve lived through.

NfK dumpling what an amazing family project! Puts my little scribblings to shame. (Maybe!). I think I was just amazed that there were so many diaries/so many years covered..... I was brought up short and thought ‘oh heck, what was this all about?’ Hence my post. What to do with them all?

My mother in law kept a daily diary all her life up until she started with dementia
(a couple of years ago)
About 5 years ago she destroyed all her old diaries.
I had mixed feelings
They were personal to her and she had presumably wrote daily about the mundane work and family life but ...
Between the lines there would have a social history, World War 2, her husband fighting in Singapore, rationing, working in an ammunition factory, a weekly signing at the police station because she had a foreign surname.
Life in the 50s, 60s and so forth,

Please don’t bin them!! A dear Aunt died and I found all her diaries. They were a delightful record of a Cornish woman and her day to day life. I have read them over and over. Even I am in there when I visited with the children, lovely to read her writings about the children and beach adventures etc. I shall pass them on to my offspring. I wish I’d kept a diary.

I bought three Grandparents' Journals, one for each of my DC (and via them, for the DGS). They're very attractive, hardback journals, with pockets for photographs and little prompts for our memories. What was your first school like? etc. I'm ploughing stoically through the questions, typing up my answers and saving them on the computer. I couldn't face writing it all out three times though, so am printing three copies off as I go and stapling the pages into the book. My only problem will be getting DH to fill in his sections - there are spaces for each of us. I've got an awful feeling it'll be down to me to type his up too. It should bring back a few memories of my teenage days in the typing pool.

Keep them, if they got saucy I always wrote in code in case my mum found them so my children won't be embarrassed but it was all mild anyway but it might well be one of those things you regret throwing and then it's too late

As I moved a couple of times and intended to be minimalistic, I went thro all my diaries from bringing my 3 up, and it was very nostalgic, as you say, where do the years go. I kept the pages of funny entries and showed the family, even the grandchildren thought they were funny ! So just keep any funny or special memory pages as they take up a lot less storage.

I also have many many diaries, but I know where they will go when I really want to get rid of them. The Great Diary Project (link above added by Gagagran) took a cd I made of a school project scrapbook I did when living abroad as a Forces child. They will also take my diaries, which include places I have visited, people I have met, and the day to day life of a stay at home mum! As long as they don't run out of funding I think this is a brilliant idea to keep safe the hand written personal diaries of people, to read about daily life in our age when such a lot will be unobtainable online. I read letters from a relative in the late 1800s and got such a thrill knowing that the handwriting belonged to my people. Hopefully my descendants will find the same interest in my scribblings.
I also enjoy reading my own diaries and seeing what antics the children got up to!

lovely idea

I think your family would love to read them after you have gone. ( - Which of course is many many years away yet.)
They are family history and will mean a lot to your daughters one day.

Definately KEEP!!!
My grandfather kept a daily diary for alot of years. Mostly daily events. They were thrown out on his death. Alot of social commentary about my family lost for ever.

I agree, a piece of social history, so keep them and pass them on.

Years ago I found a diary of my grandfather's hand written in pencil recounting his trip to America on the liner Arcadia in about 1898 if I remember rightly. it got packed away when we moved and I keep meaning to dig it out and read it.

Keep for your daughter so she can read them after you've gone. It will be like having a part of you alive forever.

Definitely keep them, I have only ever kept a diary for appointments & Birthdays. My DD asked me a while back what my DF was like as he died before she was born. DM re-married so DD only ever knew my Step-F as her much loved Granddad. DM has always kept a diary but these days only uses them for appointments/meetings etc, no longer little comments which were in her earlier ones.

Definitely keep them to leave for your children to read when you’re gone. I regret throwing my love letters from my husband, they would have loved to had read them and so would have I.
I’ve kept a diary from my late father, nothing really interesting in it, but he wrote it

I have a diary my maternal grandmother kept just after she was widowed, so that my aunt and mother who were toddlers at the time would have some of her memories of their father. Much later (when I was 13) and she knew she was dying of cancer, she wrote another diary telling her daughters why she had decided against treatment.

Both my mother and aunt found these diaries painful to read immediately after my grandmother's death, but later they were glad they had them, as were my sister and I.

So my advice is: keep them for your daughters, but go through them now, on your own, and write a letter explaining anything that might hurt one or other of your girls.

Alternatively, you could tell your daughters these diaries exist and suggest they read them now while they can still come and ask you about anything that they want to know more about. I know my mother would have welcomed the opportunity to ask her mother about one or two things.

I have volumes and volumes of notebooks where I write down my thoughts. .(Appointments and so on are separate.) I‘d like to get rid of them, but how? Too much to shred, and I don’t burn things. I don’t want my family to read them - they’re too personal and probably contain some hurtful things, though they are mostly quite boring, not to mention illegible.

If you’re decluttering, or dont want your children to read everything, you could perhaps go through them and write an account for them in book form. Several of DH’s family have written accounts of their lives and published them just for family.
Please could I ask Maggiemaybe to handwrite a few things in her account so that her children have their Mum’s writing to look at. It’s the thing I treasure most about my what my forebears left behind.

I would bin/burn the lot. Dramatic but true. We're back to 'stuff' again and the burden it can be either when moving or the unkindness handed down to the children at house clearance time. I don't say this easily but definitely. I'm in the process now. Horrid.

You've all reminded me that my dear Mum kept a diary for years before she had a stroke and couldn't write . It was always one of those big Boots diaries.
I think (hope) my sister has them now. I would love to read them again, as I approach the age she was in her last years.
So do keep writing, Urmstongran.

ps but I have a small reservation - could that be an invasion of privacy?

Keep them. they are social history. My husband loves the one his mother wrote for the first 2 years of his birth. mentions it proudly sometimes to guests.

Use them as a basis for a novel. I did!

I have a friend who has just found her late father's diaries, and she is now typing them into her computer so that her daughters and grandchildren can read them in years to come. She is learning things about her dad that she never knew.