To be sure there were some difficulties in the way. You might expect from the family chronicler a faithful notice of the diseases which had proved dangerous or fatal; to this part of his duty there could be no objection. But to assure the same fidelity concerning moral and intellectual failings or vices, requires a degree of independence not to be hoped for from a writer so circumstanced. If it had still been the custom for great families to keep a Fool, as in old times, our Philosopher in his legislative character would have required that the Fool's more notable sayings should be recorded, well knowing that in his privileged freedom of speech, and the monitions and rebukes which he conveyed in a jest, the desiderated information would be contained. But in our present state of manners he could devise no better check upon the family historiographer,—no better provision against his sins both of omission and of commission, than that of the village or parish chronicle; for in every village or parish he would have had every notable event that occurred within its boundaries duly and authentically recorded. And as it should be the Chronicler's duty to keep a Remembrancer as well as a Register, in which whatever he could gather from tradition, or from the recollections of old persons was to be preserved, the real character which every person of local distinction had left behind him among his domestics and his neighbours would be found here, whatever might be recorded upon his monument.
By these means, one supplying the deficiencies of the other, our philosopher thought a knowledge of the defects and excellencies of every considerable family might be obtained, sufficient for the purposes of physiology, and for the public good.
There was a man in the neighbouring village of Bentley, who he used to say, would have made an excellent Parish Chronicler, an office which he thought might well be united with that of Parish Clerk.3 This person went by the name of Billy Dutchman: he was a journeyman stone-mason, and kept a book wherein he inserted the name of every one by whom he had been employed, how many days he had worked in every week, and how many he had been idle, either owing to sickness or any other cause, and what money he had earned in each week, summing up the whole at the year's end. His earning in the course of nine and twenty years beginning in 1767, amounts to £583. 18s. 3d., being, he said, upon an average, seven shillings and ninepence a week.
3 Such a Chronicler is old James Long—now 77 years of age—50 of which he has served in the capacity of Parish Clerk of West-Tarring, in the County of Sussex. There is no by-gone incident in this, or the neighbouring Parishes,—no mere—stone or balk—with which he is not acquainted. Aged and truthful Chronicler!
—Enjoy thy plainness
It nothing ill becomes thee.—
Since the above was written the old man has been gathered to his fathers. Requiescat in pace!
The Doctor would have approved of Jacob Abbott's extension of his own plan, and adaptation of it to a moral and religious purpose. Jacob Abbott, without any view to the physical importance of such documents, advises that domestic journals should be kept, “Let three or four of the older brothers and sisters of a family agree to write a history of the family, any father would procure a book for this purpose, and if the writers are young, the articles intended for insertion in it might be written first on separate paper, and then corrected and transcribed. The subjects suitable to be recorded in such a book will suggest themselves to every one; a description of the place of residence at the time of commencing the book, with similar descriptions of other places from time to time, in case of removals; the journies or absences of the head of the family or its members; the sad scenes of sickness or death which may be witnessed, and the joyous ones of weddings, or festivities, or holydays; the manner in which the members are from time to time employed; and pictures of the scenes which the fire-side group exhibits in the long winter evening, or the conversation which is heard, and the plans formed at the supper table or in the morning walk.
“If a family, where it is first established, should commence with such a record of their own efforts and plans, and the various dealings of Providence towards them, the father and the mother carrying it on jointly until the children are old enough to take the pen, they would find the work a source of great improvement and pleasure. It would tend to keep distinctly in view the great objects for which they ought to live; and repeatedly recognizing, as they doubtless would do, the hand of God, they would feel more sensibly and more constantly their dependence upon him.”