And while that’s a great illustration of the value of depositing papers with the Church History Library, I can’t help but hope that someone else in your family someday puts a hand between two file folders and unexpectedly discovers the original but now missing account.

I have a file box of my grandmother’s genealogy papers, mostly typed family group sheets and copies of typed histories written for the DUP and other items of minor interest. I was looking for a history I knew I had of my great-great grandfather William Glade and put my hand in between a couple of file folders and pulled out a little bundle of papers. It was stationery paper, the color of the Financial Times (a slightly orange pink), and in beautiful penmanship contained the letters that another ancestor, Henry Green, wrote home to England right after he arrived in Salt Lake City in 1887. I had absolutely no idea that I had these letters in the file box under my desk.

And, about putting items in the Church History Library: my grandfather had his great-grandfather’s original account of his missionary work in Denmark, his trip to America, his service in the Blackhawk War, and his pioneering trip to Arizona in 1876. Somewhere in the last 10 or 15 years of his life my grandfather gradually developed Alzheimers, and for a number of years no one realized how impaired his thinking was, and somewhere during that time, the journal entirely disappeared from the family collections.

Luckily we have two photocopies of it, and at some point he donated a partial typescript to the Church Archives, but I do wish we had the originals.

As for style, I just tell stories and let the conclusions draw themselves. Everybody likes stories of people doing things, with beginnings and middles and endings.

If you need models, check the Topical Guide (link in upper lefthand corner of this screen) and search for “Latter-day Saint Lives.” There are a lot of examples there of telling stories of people’s lives in somewhat different styles.

I wonder how many teenage diaries they have. That would be a special niche in history, I think — I’ve transcribed and annotated a teenage diary of a distant cousin (sent to me because of our having the same unusual last name), and it was fascinating to compare and contrast her life in the 1880s with a teen’s life a century later. She wasn’t LDS, alas, so I couldn’t give it to the library here, but it made a nice addition to a library in western New York.

I smell a guest post based on Addie May’s life, Grant. An episode drawn directly from her journal in her own words, or re-narrated by you, and framed with a paragraph like your comment here to situate her in time and place would be most welcome.