[Author's note: This series of excerpts from Regina Shober Gray’s diary began here.]

A great feature of Regina Shober Gray’s diary is the way she translates what she sees into words that..Continue reading →

[Author’s note: This series of excerpts from Regina Shober Gray’s diary began here.]

In 1878, the Grays went abroad for much of the year: it was such a momentous trip that Mrs. Gray [1] took..Continue reading →

[Author’s note: This series of excerpts from the Regina Shober Gray diary began here.]

The year 1876 marks the onset of Dr. Gray’s debilitating illness. He had the first of a series of..Continue reading →

I am fortunate in having photographs of many of my relatives, and more fortunate still in that I can identify so many of them. Often the work has been done for me, as to names; sometimes my work is cut out for me in terms of fitting them into the family tree. I have..

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By this period of the Gray diary, the month of June was generally a month in which Mrs. Gray visited her surviving siblings in Philadelphia and Pottsville, Pennsylvania. In 1873, the..Continue reading →

[Author's note: This series began here and continues here.]

In June 1871, Regina Shober Gray [1] was in Pennsylvania, and her omnibus diary entry for 9 June covers the first ten days of her..Continue reading →

Continuing my occasional series on the month of May in Regina Shober Gray’s diary, [1] I thought it might be interesting to look at the first five years after the end of the Civil War. One..Continue reading →

One of the joys of old photographs is the occasional detail, the one that hovers at the margin, away from the central feature of the image. Looking through one of my grandmother’s albums – helpfully marked “Vol. 1,” although I’m not sure..

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Another way in to Regina Shober Gray’s diary is through selected entries clustered around the same date. Today is 19 May, so – to pick the arbitrary span of the Civil War years – what sorts..Continue reading →

My paternal grandfather kept scrapbooks all his adult life, beginning with volumes chronicling his time at school in Arizona a century ago. He started at Harvard in..

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