I am not the first in my family to write journals. My mother kept journals, but I don’t think she wrote every day. What she did do of which I am aware is to write daily when she was traveling. She loved to travel and over the years she made several international trips, including bike touring in China, Shri Lanka, the Philippines and other places. She wrote up her trip journals and when she got home she would type them, with several carbon copies which she mailed to her sisters and to her children. I am sure that some of my love of traveling comes from reading her stories of her adventures.

One of the most prolific writers in our family, however, was my mothers maternal grandfather. Roy Russell was the first court reporter in the Montana Territory. The territory was recognized in 1864, and shortly afterward, Roy and his wife, Hattie, came up the Missouri River to Fort Benton, Montana, which was as far as the steamships could navigate. His work as a court recorder took him to the territorial capital at Virginia City and after Montana became a state in 1889, he worked in the state capitol at Helena for some time. They always kept coming back to Fort Benton, however, which is where they were when my mother was a little girl.

Roy was a prolific journalist. His journals are the primary reason for the trip we are on right now. The journals were carefully placed in acid free sleeves by my mother and her sister. Then they were placed in banker’s boxes and set into an old deep freeze, which provided waterproof and mouse-proof storage. There are 10 or 12 of those banker’s boxes with those journals and they needed to be taken from the property we own in Montana before the sale is finalized. After more than a decade of wondering what to do with the journals, a plan has finally emerged.

The first step for the journals is to have them digitized. Our son, who is a librarian, will help me find a service that can make digital copies of all of the journals. After they are digitized, both the Montana Historical Museum and the Archives of the Montana United Methodist Church are interested in archiving the journals. I am hoping that one or the other of these institutions can make the journals available through a website so that family members and future historians will have easy access to them. After the journals are digitized, I will probably also keep a copy and make it available to family members and friends who request journals from me. The original documents probably will eventually end up in the Fort Benton, Montana Heritage Complex.

There are plenty of historic journals that contain mostly commentary on the weather and on day to day activities, and I am sure that Grandpa Russell’s journals contain a fair amount of those things. However, of particular interest to me are the references to Brother Van. Brother Van was a United Methodist Circuit Riding Preacher who arrived in Fort Benton in 1872, having ridden the steam ship up the Missouri just like my mother’s grandparents. Brother Van established a number of churches and quickly became a beloved fixture in the Methodist Church in Montana. At least two biographies of Brother Van have been written and there are scores of Brother Van stories that remain.

However, Brother Van did not write down any of his sermons. Although he was renowned as a dramatic preacher, he preached from the bible and from the heart and did not use written notes. The result is that none of his sermons are known to remain.

Brother Van and Roy Russell were friends and family lore says that Roy not only listened to Brother Van preach on numerous occasions, he also used his court reporting skills to record some of Brother Van’s sermons.

Here is where the challenge lies. I have 10 or 12 banner’s boxes of journals. That is a lot of reading to accomplish. I don’t know if I will find a sermon in the first box I read or in the last. I hope that there might be several and that I might find one fairly early in my reading of the journals and that the find might give me energy for quite a bit of additional reading. I’m going to try to find journals from 1872 to start because that was the year that Brother Van arrived in Montana. I’m hoping that Roy recorded his arrival and perhaps one of his early sermons in the Fort Benton Methodist Church. Roy and Hattie were stalwart members of that church and would have attended worship every Sunday that they were in town.

Today the journals are in their acid proof sleeves inside of the banker’s boxes, inside of water-proof boxes that are in the back of my pickup. We’ve still got 325 miles to get them home. Then they will go into temporary storage at our son’s farm until we can get the digitizing process started. I am expecting that it will be quite a while before I make a plan and sit down to read the journals.

Right now, however, I can at least claim that I come by my wordiness and my keeping of journals in part because of my family heritage. I don’t know about generations before grandpa Roy, but I do know how prolific he was. After all, I am now in possession of his journals. There are a lot of them! I know that my stewardship of these journals will be short, if for no other reason that I only have a few decades left of my life. I am aware of the responsibility that comes with taking care of the journals. After all they are more than a century old and some of them are 150 years old. They were treasured and kept by his daughter and by her daughters, who didn’t know how to make them widely available, but who did appreciate their value. I hope that I can honor the trust that I have inherited and make wise decisions regarding the future of the journals.

My journals, on the other hand, are already digitized. They are available on my web site. I have no clue whether or not anyone in future generations will have any interest in what I am writing.