Diary Transcriptions

Naomi Cream, the great-great-great granddaughter of Solomon Lyon, painstakingly transcribed the hundreds of pages of A.S. Lyon's and Sarah Lindo Lyon's nineteenth-century diaries. A visit to the digital copies of these pages will indicate the extraordinary challenges of completing this work. Pages from the nineteenth- century diaries are faded, while the handwriting appears in swirly cursive alongside obscure abreviations. To make matters even more challenging, Naomi Cream worked not from the original, but from a faded photocopy of the original. Her work makes these remarkable diaries both accessible and clear. 

Sarah Wyer, a former graduate student at the University of Oregon, was responsible for transcribing the Mystery diary, or the diary whose author is unknown. This particular diary contains brittle and torn pages, making a clear and thorough transcription impossible. Still, however, reading her tremendous work on the transcription enables us to see fragments of the writer's experiences visiting New York in 1876. It's a rare and unusual account of a travel writer's experience of leaving home to visit a foreign country, recounting along the way the wide range of people and experiences he meets. 

Transcription of A.S. Lyon's Diary (1823), by Naomi Cream

Transcription of A.S. Lyon's Diary (1826-1839), by Naomi Cream

Transcription of Sarah Lindo's Diary (1840), by Naomi Cream

Transcription of Unknown Diarist (1876), by Sarah Wyer

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