Old school papers and notebooks can be a wonderful source of information on an individual. It can be fun to review and to compare them to current materials with similar topics and themes. People also like to see old school yearbooks with their storylines, autographs and maybe even a cryptic note or two.
We recently came across a similar, but much rarer, find. While going through a large pile of papers and photos and sorting them into piles to keep, distribute or recycle, we found a notebook from Crofton House School (a private girls' school still in operation in Vancouver) that contained some wonderful "personal" information.
This notebook, with the owner's name on the cover, was like an expanded autograph book in which each signature also had a long list of personal traits, likes and dislikes, really a whole page of wonderful character material.
The 1923 notebook contains information from 42 schoolgirls from 14 to 20 years old. Of the 42 young women, we have identified seven from New Westminster. For now we will not use any of their names, but in time we will see if we can connect to current family members and place the book in the Crofton House School archives.
For the seven local girls, we compared some of the things they filled in and found some that were quite interesting and eye opening. Maybe we will be able to find out how the individual lives played out - intriguing, but for now, a few examples.
For favourite book, there were classics and others. There was Bleak House, Vanity Fair and Treasure Island along with The Lamp in the Desert and Molly Brown's School Days. For favourite actor, there was Rudolf Valentino, Raymond Navaro and Richard Dix. For favourite actress, there was Bebe Daniels, Lillian Gish, and Gloria Swanson.
Favourite aversions included boiled onions, getting up early, castor oil, snakes and snails, the dentist, and "most people." For favourite ambition, there was "to do as I like when I like," to teach costume design, to be famous, to be leisurely and "to be wealthy and able to help the sick and poor."
A favourite pastime ranged all the way from horse racing, swimming and going to shows, to loafing, trolling for salmon and "not having anything to do but do as I like." For favourite work, there was cutting the grass and washing dishes all the way to "playing the vamp."
Favourite expressions had quite a range, including "wouldn't you like to know," "suffering cats," and "hot puppies,"and of course those like "curses," "oh hell," and "gosh darn gee whiz." For a favourite remark, we find the recognizable "it certainly is the cat's whiskers" all the way to the very curious, "oh, how birdish." These and hundreds more comments from local school girls of 90 years ago made for fascinating reading.
