Katharine M. Jones

The Diary of a Southern Lady: Georgina Francis Barrett Devlin, 1852-1912 Katharine M. Jones

In 1852 Georgina F. Devlin was a young English immigrant with two small children when she began to keep a record of her life. She continued until 1912, when she was a great grandmother living with her widowed daughter and her family. She noted both items of historic interest and of everyday happenings within her large family. She recorded the Civil War swirling around the home in Yazoo County, Mississippi, when she and the children hid in the woods and her husband's cotton was burned. She visited her brothers in Canada and saw the famous tight-rope walker "Blondin" cross Niagara Falls. She went from traveling in a stage coach, to riding on a streetcar, to riding in her son-in-law's automobile. This well footnoted diary will be of interest to anyone with a particularly interest in Southern history, the Civil War, and the developments of rural and small town life during this period.