A collaboration between the Oxford County Archives and the Woodstock Art Gallery, The Diary of Ella Youmans project began when a local resident brought a diary to Oxford County Archives in hopes that staff could determine the diary’s provenance and decipher the text. Staff discovered that the diary belonged to a young woman named Ella Youmans, who would later become the mother of Woodstock artist Florence Carlyle.
Upon the diary’s formal donation to the Woodstock Art Gallery, staff at the Gallery and Archives began working on bringing her diary to life. This exhibit is an opportunity to come to know Ella through her own thoughts and words on the sociocultural aspects of life for women in 1860, and covers a variety of subjects such as education, religion, politics, relationship and marriage. The diary also includes her travels between her family home in Picton, Ontario, and North Carolina and her views on the American South, enslaved persons and the impending civil war.
