The richest sources on life in the nineteenth century are also the rarest: private letters and diaries. Such records reveal people's thoughts and feelings in a way other records cannot. Several people in Augusta County kept detailed diaries during the Civil War, but such records are much less common for the years before the conflict. We hope that the Recent Acquisition file will soon contain records in this category for the 1850s. We present here two diaries from the Civil War years, one from Nancy Emerson (a scanned-in manuscript version from Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, along with its transcription) and the other a published diary of Joseph Waddell.
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