Diary for Wednesday, October 25th, 1871

Rains this morn. Boys go out & husk corn until noon then Joel Clark comes to dinner. Berty & Pa goes to the church with him to practice for the concert this Eve. it rains a little all day I think no one will come. the boys Ed & Joe husk corn after dinner alone.

Last Monday morn Old Mr Jennings & Abe Shaply were here for money - Pa paid Abe 80 Dollars. owes him 15. Paid Mr Jennings 100. one hundred
Pa was introduced (> this morn) to our other new minister & wife Mr Cooksie. Mr Loc's little house over by the church is Bought for the Parsonage. paid two hundred dollars for it. We hear to day Mrs Othout is getting better. Henry Clark here to Tea. Keeps his horses in our Barn. Joel has his horse here too. drove old maze(?) with his horse up home & Back here. We all go to church to the concert. Nettie Boys & all. Boys get home first & go to bed. there was about 80 persons present. they took in $15 all told. Rainy all day. & raining hard when we come home.

The paragraphs above represent two entries from the same day. One in the afternoon and one in the evening. As I was reading these entries, I made another little breakthrough with her handwriting. It is not only names that trip me up, but, in many cases, capitalization. It seems to me that the constant in capitalization (aside from names) is based on which letter is at the start of a word. S, T and B are often, but not always capitals. According to some online references, nouns have been capitalized in both German and English. Anyway, I realized that a word I had been looking at a few times was "Tea". I was originally confused as it looked like the word "Sea" and in a previous post I guessed that it was a slightly strange writing of "Day" as in "to Day". which is also weird. I knew that wasn't quite right but also knew it wasn't "...our new preacher here to Sea". I have since corrected that passage.