h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have kept a diary every day - the type that recalls the day's events - every day since the 90s. Will anyone be interested in my diaries in the future? Will they be important historical documents one day? Is it worth getting my folks to store them away in a steel safe after I KTB?

(Actually, the events of late March, 2004, would probably interest people now )

Yes
In 100 years, your diaries will be one of the few accounts by ordinary people to survive.
Look how few diaries of ordinary people from the late Victorian / Edwardian era exist.

They could well be of intrest them now

That should read "publish them now"

That, Groob, is a very good question, with two answers and a comment from here:

1. Personally, I've never kept a diary as such. What I have done is to put together my 'Life in Snippets' for posterity. My daughter has a copy and can, of course, do with it as she will... as can you!
- - - -
2. My mum did
[extract from my life in snippets]
>>
Late 1990s:
My mother was then approaching her own 90s, travel over, peering through the mists at her end (though it was five years or more before her wish was granted).
Watching her making one final preparation: systematically going through her diaries (5-year ones for as long as I could remember).
Reading a page, tearing it out and shredding it. Nothing I could say persuaded her otherwise... She'd been in Uganda for 15 years or so, from 1950, as wife of a senior company officer. However much rubbish or personal stuff, there must have been gems in there ... the End Of Empire...
<<

= = = = = = = =

Would I have read through them? That depends on how busy or reflective I was at any particular time that I came across them -
and that, in turn, would have depended on them continuing to be kept, across all the various moves we made.

From the above, my opinion is that your diaries are for You.


unless, of course, you turn out to be a World or A National figure...

Publish without the highly personal information. I still think it might be a document of our times, particularly if there are comments regarding national events, costs of things such as houses black and white TV, and just 3 TV channels. Living with the threat of nuclear war all gone now I hope.

How did we live...
You can tell your side of it!
Mr Peyps mk II

The answer is almost definitely yes.

The things that are most interesting to people in the future are always the things that seem worthless at the time - because everyone tends to junk them. In a hundred years' time, there will probably be at least fifty extant accounts of what the Prince of Wales did on any given day in 2013, but very few about what a woman who works in Asda was doing.

Save 'em if you can. Maybe online records will survive, but more
likely not, so hard copies will be very important in future.

As for any intensely personal moments, especially of a emotional
or sexual nature, fear not. It was these that made Sam Pepys Diary
such a best seller for centuries (in spite of several attempts by many
to expurgate the more intimate entries).

~jwf~

Scholars have pored over diaries of Southerners during the American Civil War. To their surprise, in about a fifth of the diaries the war was not mentioned at all.

By all means keep your diaries.

I, (a student of history myself), agree with everyone else here: keep it. Except that I think you should keep the personal bits in. After all, once you're dead, who cares if your life is laid bare for all to see? It will be valuable to future generations, and that's WAY more important than the privacy of... um... a currently living, but eventually dead, but don't take that the wrong way, because everybody dies eventually... individual....



Look, all I'm sayin' is that once you're dead and buried, what is there to be gained by omitting the sordid details of the only life you ever had?

At uni in 1970, my favourite subject (after sex, drugs and rock'n'roll) was American History 101. I had a variety of courses, following the then popular theory of 'finding myself' but Economics, Astronomy, English Lit and Anthropology, although interesting in their own right, didn't have the appeal of AH101. The prof read from his Great Grandfather's diary, which dated to the Civil War. Fascinating stuff, especially within the framework of published texts.

Who knows, perhaps your great grand child or distant relative will teach the turbulent era of the turn of the Twenty First Century.

Who knows, your diaries might even be turned into a movie .