Back in 2010, I started a blog called BRECKINRIDGE DIARIES. Blogging had intrigued me for years. As a historian, the thought of having a place to record the random musing of an ordinary person was fascinating. I did the majority of my graduate work using letters and diaries to better understand the lives of people long dead – to better understand how people lived in the past. So much was in those letters and diaries but so much was missing as well. I haven’t written a personal letter since college. Blogging is the letter writing of the 21st century. Since I’m a voyeur into the lives of people long gone (by reading their letters and trying to make sense of their lives), I figured it is only appropriate that I write letters of my own to invisible faces. BRECKINRIDGE DIARIES was my experiment.

Once I quit museum work and dove head first into the yarn world, my blogging became my work – I blogged to attract business. So after closing my yarn shop in 2017, I rediscovered my thesis and started to tackle some of the questions unanswered when the signature pages were signed in 2005. History is about the past but it is never finished.

Let me explain the title of this blog. No, my name is not Breckinridge. I’m not even related to anybody named Breckinridge (as far as I know). So why the title BRECKINRIDGE DIARIES? It could have easily been called THOUGHTS WHILE DRIVING or MUSING OF A UNLIKELY FEMALE HISTORIAN – both were early contenders. But just like my handle MUSEUMGIRLKNITZ, titles have a way of making themselves known!

I wrote my master’s thesis on a woman named Katherine Carson Breckinridge. She was born in 1853 and died in 1921. You will learn a lot more about her later. However, it was during the thesis writing process that I first thought about blogging. There were random thoughts and random roads of research that I traveled down and I wanted to place to record them. I was never a good diarist because I am a horrible speller. Emails and Facebook didn’t seem to fill the need. So this is my diary of Katherine Carson Breckinridge. It’s about her life, my research through her letters, and other random musings of a historian who got tangled up in yarn along the way.

So please indulge me – Tuesdays will be my usual knitting-related posts but Thursdays will now be reserved for history. For KCB. For a yarn of a different kind.