It feels odd to read someone else’s diary. The prying. The TMI – too much information – of it all. The frisson of transgression is lessened, however, through the distance of time.

It is not like I am rifling through someone’s desk to read their private thoughts, someone who might appear at the door at any moment. The diaries I read are well-over 100 years old and the diarists long dead.

As a cataloger of old manuscripts, I frequently must read handwritten diaries to discern what threads of interest can be drawn out to interpret the diary or to discover themes within its contents. The dead, in this sense, speak to us. They hold up a mirror of humanity in which we often see ourselves and our foibles.

The eight handwritten diaries begun by fifteen-year-old J. Edward Schmidt of Lebanon, Pennsylvania in 1906 and kept by him until he was 22 are interesting for two reasons: they were kept by a young man for an extended period and they are augmented by photographs and other insertions.

As an amateur shutterbug, Schmidt intersperses candid snapshots of his devoted girlfriend (and later beloved wife) throughout his writings. Laid in, from time to time, are pressed flowers, newspaper clippings, and small bits of ephemera.

Schmidt writes about the daily activities of an affluent young man growing up in the bucolic setting of Lebanon and he describes his responsibilities working at his father’s jewelry store: cleaning and fixing clocks, making police badges, and polishing, soldering, and engraving.

Schmidt’s other duties include delivering and mailing catalogs, preparing circulars, and hand-delivering pamphlets from house to house. In what sounds like a gang of possible diamond ring thieves, he describes a trip to the police station.

A love of hiking and camping and the outdoors is a defining aspect of his Edward’s budding love and devotion to Mary form a fundamental and rather touching component of his handwritten diaries.

Mary is never far from his thoughts (if ever) and when she goes off to Mrs. Wright’s preparatory school in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania (Mary’s “prison”) his love pangs are especially noted. Schmidt’s photographs (mainly of Mary) are often captioned and dated, e.g.”Reminiscences of a Grand Day, 12–8–07.” We learn in the diary the author was an amateur photographer and developed his own pictures.

In recent years, literary critics and manuscript curators have taken to referring to handwritten diaries, journals, and scrapbooks as self-works. Schmidt’s handwritten diaries are unusual because they are illustrated with photographs and share scrapbook-like qualities. In this way, his diaries emulate the printed books of his day which were more and more being illustrated from photographs rather than by drawings.

Edward’s handwritten diaries are narrative and lengthy, filled with many vignettes and events that are engaging and informative. His writing is not high style or literary, but it comes from the heart and reveals a sensitive inner portrait of a young man.

Outwardly, Edward’s handwritten diaries reflections reflect a kind, obedient, and loyal individual fitting into the middle-class milieu during the robust years of the 1910s in America. We last find Edward Schmidt registering for the draft during World War II, of else we know little. His illustrated diaries remain. Edward speaks to us still.