About

Hello to you. Thank you for stopping by "The Diary of a Maine Farm Wife."
These are the every day entries of my maternal grandmother Lillian Blair Bailey, from the years of 1927 until 1969 . She was my kindred spirit. And yes, she was a Maine Farm Wife, and so much more. She was born Lillian Forrest Blair in 1900 in Woolwich, Maine on the Blair Homestead. The Blair ancestors immigrated from Scotland in 1738. She grew up on the Blair homestead built with conscription money from the Revolutionary War. She was the youngest of three sisters by several years. Her mother was forty-two when she was born.

She was educated in the local schoolhouse and graduated from Morse Academy in Bath in 1917. She married my grandfather Oscar Delano Bailey, also born in 1900, in 1925. She had three children. Jean, the oldest, my mother Marilyn, and Claire.They were each about four years apart.

My grandmother and grandfather were both characters and loved animals. They were always inheriting some stray or another.They had farm animals and hunting dogs. My grandmother had a habit of naming various beasts after the neighbors. I don't know if they ever figured it out, but it was one of the many endearing things about her. She was very blunt and to the point and big-hearted. I got my love of horses from her that is with me to this day.

As you set out on this journey, you will meet people that you will become familiar with, and some that just pass through. My grandfather had a number of brothers, but only a couple of them are mentioned on a regular basis. Political correctness by today's standards are not part of the story.

I have written everything exactly as it is entered. She had scrawling, hard to read handwriting that I  have learned to decipher for the most part. She rarely bothered to punctuate, and abbreviated a good part of the time. My mother did a lot of translating for me the first time I read them. She told me what she could about the people that she could remember. My grandmother wasn't one to take the time to be elaborate in her writing, even though she was very well-read. That was about the only time she sat still.

I will make notes where I feel they are needed, but otherwise leave the life story as told.

It is the history of a life, a time gone on a small farm in Maine.

Toni F. Whitney
December 2011