What Happened to Anna?

Last entry from the transcription of Anna Fannie Gorham's diary.

Archives hold mysteries waiting for the curious to come along and solve. One of these can iphone 6 replacement screen be found in the diary of Anna Fannie Gorham, a young woman living in Hamilton at the beginning of the Civil War.

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Anna describes her life with entries on visiting her sisters, reading, mending and courtship.

Her diary is found in the Anna Fannie Gorham Diary Collection at Columbus State University Archives in Columbus, Ga.

Beginning on Monday, December 30, 1861, the diary presents a cloudy view of Anna’s life. It often makes oblique references, in one case mentioning only “the surprise.”

It is also, underneath the cloudiness, attentive and funny. On January 12, 1862, Anna went to a prayer meeting at the Methodist church: “Col. Mobley got up to make some remarks and Lucy Gibbs got up and left.”

Another entry describes an argument involving gunfire, ending in the arrest of a “Mr. McinTyer.” She says, “Bud locked him up in his office a while and then brought him home with him to dinner.”

Anna was smitten with her sister’s step-son, Wes Murphey, who “told me he loved me better than any one else, that he had a perfect fancy for a small lady, he did not like these overgrown girls.” After a two-year courtship, Anna became disillusioned with Capt. Murphey, recording that she sent him “a note to wound his feelings if possible. He is not the man I thought he was. he (sic) drinks very hard.”

Four days later the diary ends abruptly: “This morning the Dr. called (came) again.”

Was Anna overtaken by illness? Did she die of a broken heart? Or was the remainder of her diary simply lost  in the hardship of the coming years?

Anna’s mysterious diary is included in the Digital Library of Georgia. Perhaps an historian, or maybe just some inquisitive person, may stumble across her diary one day and wish to find answers to the questions it raises.

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The DLG has been busy

The DLG has recently completed some exciting projects. We thought we’d take a minute to catch you up.

The Atlanta Historic Newspapers Archive:

http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/atlnewspapers

The Atlanta Historic Newspapers Archive provides online access to fourteen newspaper titles published in Atlanta from 1847 to 1922. Consisting of over 67,000 newspaper pages, the archive provides historical images that are both full-text searchable and can be browsed by date. The site will provide users with a record of Atlanta’s history from its origins as an railroad terminus, through the devastation of the Civil War, to its eventual growth into one of the nation’s largest cities.

The archive includes the following Atlanta newspaper titles: Atlanta Daily Examiner (1857), Atlanta Daily Herald (1873-1876), Atlanta Georgian (1906-1911), Atlanta Intelligencer (1851, 1854-1871), Atlantian (1911-1922), Daily/Georgia Weekly Opinion (1867-1868), Gate-City Guardian (1861), Georgia Literary and Temperance Crusader (1860-1861), New Era (1869-1872), Southern Confederacy (1861-1864), Southern Miscellany, and Upper Georgia Whig (1847), Southern World (1882-1885), Sunny South (1875-1907), Weekly Constitution (1869-1882).

The Atlanta Historic Newspapers Archive is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia as part of the Georgia HomePLACE initiative. The project is supported with federal LSTA funds administered by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Georgia Public Library Service, a unit of the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia.

Other newspaper archives available through the Digital Library of Georgia include the Macon Telegraph Archive (1826-1908), the Columbus Enquirer Archive (1828-1890), the Milledgeville Historic Newspaper Archive (1808-1920), the Southern Israelite Archive (1929-1986), and the Red and Black Archive (1893-2006). These archives can be accessed at:

http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/MediaTypes/Newspapers.html

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