Victor Power

Title: Page From Power's Journal
Type: Diary
Date: February 21, 1922
Source: Minnesota Historical Society

Description: Power kept many journals containing newspaper clippings, weather information, and professional notes.
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Activities:

1. Power kept a page like this each day for many years. How do you think this kind of information might have been useful to him over time?
   
   
   
   
   Answer: These diaries could have become kind of a series of reference books for Power. He included newspaper articles, notes about the weather, and notes about business transactions or meetings. He could look back on them to find out what was said at a meeting, what a business agreement contained, or what his schedule might have been on a certain day.
2. Power clipped newspaper articles about topics that interested him and placed them on his journal pages. What can the articles he chose tell us about him?
   
   
   
   
   Answer: If we were to study more of his journal pages and read the articles, we could get a stronger impression of what was important to him. If all of the articles were written about a certain topic or theme, we might guess that the topic was one of interest or one that he felt strongly about. Since he doesn't seem to make notes about the articles themselves in his journal, we can't tell without further research whether he might agree or disagree with the issues in the articles.
3. The information on the right side of the page in his own handwriting describes a land purchase Power had recently made. What information about this purchase does he tell us?
   
   
   
   
   Answer: We know which piece of land he has bought (we could probably look it up on a map using only his description here), howmuch the land cost ($3500), what he paid as a down payment ($500), and what his interest rate was going to be (6 percent). We also know that he is planning to erect a building on this land, and the building will cost $30,000.
4. Many people during Power's time and earlier wrote daily accounts of the local weather in their journals. Why could this information be helpful for a researcher?
   
   
   
   
   Answer: If dates are not provided on the journal pages, weather information could help us guess the season of the year when the page was written. It could also inform us about major weather events that happened at the time (blizzards, tornadoes,etc.) in his obituary, or to see any comments about and how local citizens reacted.