Jennie Moore

As my more regular readers know, I've been steadily publishing the daily entries from an old leather bound journal of one Ms. Jennie Moore. What i know of her, is very little - only what I've read in this Journal and that she must be related to me, perhaps distantly. My middle name is Moore, given to me me by i believe my great grandfather Charles Moore - but the fact that i have her diary, and share a common name, could still be coincidence.

While transcribing Jennie's journal entries I've also been scouring them for clues, dates, names locations; hoping at some point she'd drop a name or a date that i could use to sort of triangulate her in space and time. I hadn't turned up anything useful, until i read today's entries.

Jennie mentioned that her birthday was today, March 4th, and that she was 38, putting her birthday at March 4th 1894. Now i had a name, and a birthday. I went searching through google, trying all sorts of combinations till i came across this page, a listing of the genealogy of one Oswegatchie Family. I'd never heard that name once before, i was a bit incredulous - I searched the page for Jennie Moore, and found one. Still, i wasn't certain - Moore is a fairly common name, and as Jenny J. will tell you, Jennie, or Jenny, or Jennifer, is as common as dirt. But then i saw this:

Then I remembered the inscription on the first page: "Merry Christmas, from John + Chas Dec 25, 1931." It must be her... but there was one problem, it lists her birthday not as 1894 as i'd calculated, but rather as 1892... Could it be that like so many people now and even then, she was hiding her age? I'd like to think that, after reading the last 3 months of journal entries i know a little bit about this woman, but to be honest, i don't know anything - i was rather surprised actually, when i found out that she was a middle aged woman, for some strange reason, she felt like a young lady, a twenty something... with her crush on Arthur ("Art came around this evening..."), love of romantic films, and seemingly adolescent melancholy.

Actually all those things considered, she does strike me as a lady that'd be perpetually 38. Perhaps that's what the ironic quotations were around the number... Or perhaps I've got the wrong gal, perhaps old man time isn't ready to give up the ghost, so to speak - and the search goes on.

You know.... I'd like to think this is her; she seems lovely to me - She seems to fit in my mind - though she is older than i imagined, and the lady in the picture seems to be around that same age, perhaps, 5-7 years younger, i feel like i can see that same girlishness that i read about, in her eyes, in her face - perhaps it was that same child-like spirit that kept her alive all the way up til 1981, almost 90 years, and interestingly enough, the same year i was born.