Mrs. H. M. Raynor (Hannah Reeve Raynor) lived in Brookhaven Hamlet for much of her later adult life. She was the second wife of Edward S. Raynor, a merchant. They were married between 1860 and 1870. She had children by her first husband, Stephen Craft, and one child by her marriage to Edward. Their home was on on the northeast corner of South Country and Beaver Dam Roads. It is no longer extant.
She faithfully maintained a simple diary from 1883 to 1906. There are 116 pages in the diary. While at first it appears to be just a daily weather report, as one reads on a sense of her daily life and the routine of the community develops.
She referred most of the time to people by their first names or short-hand abbreviations. Unless you should happen to have an intimate knowledge of her family and neighbors, it is often difficult to identified exactly whom many of them may have been. Fortunately, we have an annotated transcription made by Charles Peter Raynor (Pete). Through his considerable research effort, most of the folks have been identified. Click on the Pete Raynor Transcription icon at the bottom of each page to view both his transcription of the page and his comments. He has also prepared additional commentary, and an index of names and places, which appears at the end of the diary itself. The latest version of his work is dated October 2013.
Click the Table of Contents icon at the bottom of each page for a table of contents sorted by page number.
The original of this Diary is in the possession of Barbara and Pete Berman, East Patchogue, NY 11772. The scanning of this document was done by Marty Van Lith from the original in February 2006.
