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What Happened to Anna?

Last entry from the transcription of Anna Fannie Gorham's diary. Anna Fannie Gorham Diary Collection at Columbus State University Archives in Columbus, Ga.
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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Remember me?

Image of First Friday Briefing from the Georgia Department of Defense recounts the "sigh of relief" as all heck did not break loose upon the arrival of the year 2000.Y2K…anyone? Planes falling from the sky, computers unable to tell time, nano-level Keystone Kops type stuff bringing everything to a complete stop. I forget exactly what the fear was (we’d wake up on the LOST island?).

This First Friday Briefing (pictured) from the Georgia Department of Defense recounts the “sigh of relief” as all heck did not break loose upon the arrival of the year 2000.

You can rewind an interesting piece of recent history using the Georgia Government Publications portal in the DLG.  You can read the executive order from Governor Roy Barnes that established Georgia’s Y2K Interagency Task Force. Review the growing concern in a 1998 article from the State Personnel News titled, “Are state computers going to crash January 1, 2000?” :

Part of the problem is that over 50% of the software programs used by state government are over 11 years old and are obsolete. There aren’t even programmers around who know them. (pg.5)

Or peruse this memorandum from the Public Service Commission in which the “first electronic crisis of an automated society” leads to the conclusion of “four plausible scenarios: (I) “Crisis Avoided,” (II) “Much Ado About Nothing,” (III) “the Tempest in a Teapot,” and (IV) “Crisis.”

(You could also search the vast internet outside of the DLG for “Leonard Nimoy” and Y2K…but you didn’t hear it from me…but do it anyways.)

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