E. A. Sisson (1848-1933) was my great-grandfather. He was the father of my paternal grandmother Pearl Wilson (1877-1963). He and his cousin A.G. Tillinghast trekked from Pennsylvania and joined their cousin R.E. Whitney in the Padilla area of Washington Territory in Dec of 1872. They help dike hundreds of acres of farmland around Padilla Bay. Turning it in to one of the most productive agricultural areas in the nation.
He kept a daily diary from January 1872 until the end of 1932. These diaries were microfilmed in 1973 by the University of Washington. The original diary is in possession of Skagit County Historical Society in La Conner, WA. In the fall of 2021, my brother and I were able to get the microfilm digitized. There are 3 reels of microfilm comprising a total of 1634 microfilm frames (images). (TIFF = 30 GB, JPG = 5.7 GB of storage). There are two pages of diary entries to 1 microfilm frame. Please refer any questions, suggestions or comments to my email.
The "Diary" tab starts with transcription of 1872. The dropdown allows selection of a year. The contents of the years are the current transcription of the diary pages. The images from which the transcription was derived can be viewed using the Image Id link.
The individual diary entries are a result of countless hours of transcribing the handwritten pages. There is an entry for most every day for the timespan (1872-1832). Any "?" indicates that I can't read it or it might not be the correct name or word. &c. is an old indication of etc. or "and so forth". I initially tried to use the punctuation as in the diary, but his use of capital letters was so inconsistent, that I eventually tried to include punctation to make the entries more readable. He "almost" always spelled cloudy as clowdy, stayed as staid, bought as bot, brought as brot, ditto as dito. You also find some sentences that may be incomplete, either due to my typos or his writing.
Within each year there may be a "Highlights" button next to the year dropdown.This section will contain various interesting events or milestones, and a "clippings" section which are newspaper clippings that are interesting (to me at least). Many will have some reference to diary entries, some are just interesting about the extended families of either Edgar Sisson or Ida Leamer. Most of these clippings are from Newspapers.com (a paid service) or the digital papers at https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov (free). These articles are clipped and indexed in a database that I have created and are auto generated when the "diary" html is updated.
Their may be a "Trips" buttons which will highlight diary entries related to his or his family's trips East.
The "glossary" tab is complete. If you find a word you don't know, it might be in the glossary.
The "Other Items" tab contains groups of diary pages that weren't really diary entries. There are various newspaper clippings, account ledgers (including cost of ownership of 1929 Ford Model A), etc. There will be no attempt to transcribe these records.
The "All Images" tab contains all of the microfilm frames that were digitized. The 3 microfilm reels are numbered 001, 002 and 003 respectively. It is unclear if the reels corresponded to the order of microfilming. Logically one would assume that the reels would be in chronological order, but this is not the case. This tab represents the all of the microfilm as follows:
| Reel | Images |
|---|---|
| 001 | 0001-0747 |
| 002 | 0001-0726 |
| 003 | 0001-0161 |
| Total | 1634 |
These images are in presumed order of microfilming. Duplicate images appear, and these are either an artifact of the microfilming processor, and the image was retaken or in the case of clippings the clippings were moved to show the clippings underneath. "Non Diary" entries are either inserted by the microfilmers or are images of covers, spines, etc. of the individual diary volumes. It should be noted that most every image is part of a collection. For the actual written diary entries, the collection is the year. For those images not specifically tagged with a date, are included in the collection, but are NOT included in the "Diary" tab.
The "Clippings" tab is the entire collection from all years of newspaper clippings. These were clipped as a general interest to me or were related to individual diary entries.
The "Search" tab allows for searching the text of the following fields from all images. The search results are broken in to groups of 50 rows and is changeable to 200.
* indicates default fields to be search. The dropdown to the right of the search field will allow changing the fields to be search.
A regex search is allowed, e.g. [47a]$ for all items which end with a 4, 7 or a. The regex can be entered with /[47a]$/gim or without [47a]$ flags. The default flags are gim.
The biography is from the book entitled "History of Skagit and Snohomish County". This book was published in 1906 and contained the history of early Skagit and Snohomish counties along with selected biographies of the early pioneers.
This is a directed graph of the relationships of E.A. and his extended family to his great grandson. Many of these people are referenced in the diary.