‘Emily Project’ Offers a Window Into a Young Woman’s Life in 1932

MONTPELIER, Vt. — In 1932, 24-year-old “Emily” could have been any one of thousands of young New England women, self-conscious about her looks and her prospects for love.

Her diary entry for Sunday, March 6:

”. . . I want a boyfriend. One to take me to the movies and dances. To love me and cherish me with gentle care. Why can’t I have it? I’m not so hateful to look at, though no beauty. I’m not a fool, if I do act it.”

The diary also indicated that she was a nurse and an avid reader, and that she voted for Herbert Hoover.

But who was Emily?

Clues to the young woman’s life are contained in her diary for the year 1932 that surfaced last fall at a flea market in Waterbury. But there was no name identifying the author.

A Toronto woman, Amy Rodrigues Singer, bought the 4-by-6-inch “Daily Reminder” for 80 cents and took it home. After reading the personal notes, she became fascinated with finding out who the young woman was.

“There’s nothing but the entries,” said Rodrigues Singer.

So she turned to the world for help. Rodrigues Singer dubbed the author Emily and posted the diary entries on the World Wide Web.

The Web page, “The Emily Project,” attracted about 10,000 Internet browsers from around the world. About 30 tried to interpret the clues and offered hints at Emily’s identity.

Elementary schoolteachers across North America used the Internet page as a class project, genealogists took an interest, and the curious from as far away as England offered their thoughts by e-mail.

Emily’s Web page won numerous awards from different Internet organizations. It was so popular it attracted the attention of the state of Vermont, which links The Emily Project to the state’s Web page, making it easily accessible to anyone looking for information about Vermont.

Rodrigues Singer and her husband are computer aficionados and self-described “New England freaks.” They found the diary at a flea market at the edge of Waterbury on Sept. 30 last year.

“For 80 cents we took it away with us and began to read,” said the introduction to The Emily Project. “By the time we got to her entry for March 6th, she had become real to us.”

A few of the entries offer poignant insights into the mind of a young, single woman coming of age in the depths of the Depression. And there are references to the world around her:

“Tuesday, November 8--. . . . Stopped at Commercial High School and cast my first vote for Pres. Hoover.”

Rodrigues Singer had concerns about publishing the young woman’s intimate thoughts, even though anonymous.

“What if she finds out? She’s probably not with us,” she said from Toronto. “There is really nothing there questionable.”

Indeed, most of the entries are mundane tidbits of daily life:

“Sunday, January 23--rain: Worked all day. Read at noon and ate my lunch. Went with Mrs. Tucker and Miss Hatch to see Cassile’s Engagements--a 4-act comedy put on by the Women’s Club at the Masonic Temple. Had a 1/2 grapefruit before going to bed.”

Emily had family in the Chester area of Vermont, but there are obvious references to Springfield, Mass., and Emily’s work:

“Wednesday, November 2--. . . . Miss Mole went into Wesson Hospital to have an operation for appendix. . . . Had clinic this pm. About 40 babies there, 2 visitors from the staff.”

While Emily’s diary is intermittent and doesn’t include the author’s name, it does offer clues. There are references to Vermont towns, such as Chester, Springfield, Ludlow and the hamlets of Gassetts and Proctorsville.

But the single most revealing clue is an Oct. 29 entry:

“Saturday, October 29--. . . . Well, I’m 24 years old today. How fast the years do go by. How I wish they didn’t. One dreads becoming old. . . . In the evening Ethel and Earl and Winnifred came by. Brought me a box of chocolates. Mother and Dad gave me silk stockings.”

That entry, coupled with the place names, offered the starting point for the search for Emily’s identity.

A series of telephone calls and trips throughout the state by the Associated Press put together the puzzle.

Chester Town Clerk Sandy Walker found that a girl was born Oct. 29, 1908, to Edith Jane Earl and Ernest Gilman Horton. Her name was Irma.

The state archives in Middlesex found a 1954 marriage certificate that bore the names Irma Horton and Edward Rowe.

The 45-year-old Irma Horton married Edward Rowe on June 27 in Chester.

A second call to Walker with the name Irma Rowe elicited an excited, “Oh, that’s who she was.”

Many people in Chester remember Irma as a nurse. But it wasn’t until the diary was shown to a nephew, Paul Horton of Rutland, that the last hints of mystery disappeared.

“That’s her,” Horton said after reading the diary entries. He was referred to in the Feb. 20 entry as, “The cutest fellow. Just 6 months now.”

Irma’s niece, Winnifred Horton Longe, now 71, and sister-in-law, Ethel Horton, 93, still live across Vermont Route 11 from the well-kept stone house where Irma and her husband lived until sometime after his death Nov. 13, 1993.

The two, along with Ethel’s late husband, Earl, were referred to throughout the 1932 diary.

People remember Irma as a tiny, outgoing woman with a quick smile. The diary offers plenty of evidence of her love of books, but she also loved to sew, walk and be in outdoors, relatives said.

She was an amateur historian and an activist with the Daughters of the American Revolution. At some point in her life she suffered from tuberculosis, Horton said.

The illness might explain the single, cryptic entry that speaks of Irma being admitted to the hospital. And it could also explain why Irma slept so much.

“Tuesday, May 10:. . . . Ate lunch with Winnie. Then she walked down with me to where we got a taxi and I went on over to the hospital about 3:30. Was admitted to A2, room 2.”

There was never any further explanation, no mention of why she was in the hospital or if she had recovered.

Neither Horton nor Longe knew why Irma waited until so late in life to marry. She had boyfriends over the years. Perhaps it was because she had to care for her aging parents, Horton said.

Irma graduated from the Peter Bent Brigham School of Nursing in Boston in 1930.

Relatives remember that she worked in the Springfield area, as mentioned in the diary, but she also worked in the Old Lyme, Conn., and the Albany, N.Y., areas before returning for good to her native Chester.

Irma would have spent her years helping new mothers, running tuberculosis clinics and shampooing children’s heads for lice, said Doris Hastings, a retired public health nurse from Chester. She worked with Rowe for a year in the late 1960s, up until Rowe retired.

Neither Horton nor Longe know how Irma’s diary ended up at the Waterbury flea market where Rodrigues Singer bought it.

“The only thing I can think of is, a year, year-and-a-half ago when she was in the nursing home we sold the house and the contents,” Horton said. “There was an awful lot of stuff that was there.”

Rodrigues Singer said that on one level she was disappointed to have the mystery of Emily solved. On another, she’s glad to learn who wrote the diary.

“I felt like I knew her. She affects people,” Rodrigues Singer said.

“Everybody has the exact same concerns. It’s so completely universal and timeless,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons I had to find out who she was.”

Irma Horton Rowe died last Dec. 15 at the age of 87 in a Ludlow nursing home, just as the worldwide search for her identity got underway.

The Emily Project can be found at https://www.interlog.com/~amy/phpl.cgi?Emily.html