A Day in the Life of a Soldier, Whaler, Sailor, Shoemaker, Farmer:: The Diaries of Sidney Douglas Way from 1858-1898 (Part 1)

PrefaceSidney Douglas Way (1843-1898), the last of eleven siblings and my great grandfather, led a very interesting life which he documented in a diary he kept from his 16th birthday until a week before his death. The daily entries in this diary are usually only a sentence or two, including a reference to the weather, and there are blanks at the beginning and during the periods when he was sick. Also, there is a short blank period when he decided to stop making entries but he soon took up the diary again. After finishing school, he became a shoemaker. However, finding work was difficult so he went whaling but returned to shoemaking after the trip. Then, when the Civil War started he enlisted in the Irish Regiment in Boston, MA, but left after a couple of days to enlist in the 2nd Vermont Volunteers. He became sick and was sent home to die but recovered and enlisted in the 1st Rhode Island Cavalry from which he was discharged when the war ended. He tried to return to shoe-making but jobs were even harder to find, so he tried a number of occupations, the most interesting being an unsuccessful traveling popcorn salesman. He also went whaling again and had some intriguing experiences in the Caribbean area. He was eventually shipwrecked but returned home safely. At the insistence of this mother, he gave up whaling for good. He finally met and married the right woman, soon settling down on her father's farm in southern Vermont. Eventually, he bought the farm from his father-in-law and remained a farmer there for the rest of his life. He had constant health problems related to his time in the war. He also had a long battle with the government about his pension, problems that bear heavily on the transcription and editing of the diary because he made a second, different version of the diary to give to the government.I first became aware of the diary when I was about ten years old. My aunt, Katherine Plummer Jeffery, my mother's sister and granddaughter of Sidney, told me some stories about the farm in Vermont. I asked her how she knew all this and she said that she had read it in his diary. I heard no more about the diary until I was 16. My aunt took me on a week-long tour around New England as a coming-of-age present. During the trip, we visited the farm and the diary again came up in our discussions. I suggested that I be allowed to help but she said that it was her hobby and she wanted to work on it alone. The next time the diary came up was when I was looking around for a subject for a Masters Degree. I asked her if I could use the diary as the basis for research into the Civil War. She told me that she had decided not to show the diary to anyone until after all the people mentioned in it were dead. I had no further discussions with her about the diary or Sidney because I moved to Japan.There were two copies of the diary and after my aunt died she left a copy along with her typed transcriptions to each of her children, Edwin Jeffery and Ruth Jeffery Hennessey. During one of my infrequent trips to the US, I met with my cousins and obtained a copy of my aunt's typed transcriptions and started to input the text into a word processor so that it would be easier to study. I immediately became aware that my aunt had been confused by the two diaries. The content was different, especially during and after the Civil War. There entries that had him sick, near death, at his parents' and another for the same day that had him happily working and courting women some hundreds of miles away.To better understand this, I prepared a spreadsheet with three columns. The left-hand column contained every date from the day he started the diary until the day of his last entry. The center column contained his entries from what appeared to be the dairy and, finally, the right-hand column contained the entries from what appeared to be a second version of the dairy.