Helen Price (1898–1967), my grandmother, attended Ontario Ladies’ College (now Trafalgar Castle School) during her sophomore and junior years (the school years 1912–1913 and 1913–1914). We don’t know where she had spent her freshman year, but we do know that she left O.L.C. in 1914 to spend her senior year back in Toronto, at Malvern Collegiate.
Between March and June 1914, the final months of her junior year, she recorded her thoughts and preserved some of her souvenirs in a black-covered notebook, part journal and part scrapbook. In its pages, she gives us a portrait not just of herself, a strong-willed sixteen-year-old, but also of her teachers, her family, and some of her classmates and their families.
I’ve transcribed Helen’s notebook and prepared an annotated edition, which you can download using the link below.
Helen’s pen went silent when the school year ended but resumed briefly, after a seven-month hiatus, with a handful of entries in the first months of 1915.
The journal must have been important to Helen because she kept it among her things until her death in 1967. It then passed to her daughter, Betty McTavish, and later to her granddaughter, Karen Pokocky. Karen has now entrusted it to me, in my role as the family’s unofficial historian.
I was sixteen when my grandmother died, the same age — almost to the month — as she was when she wrote this journal. In its portrayal of a privileged but endearing teenager, I see reflected some of the same traits I saw in my grandmother fifty years later.
As a family historian, my mission is to keep the memory of my ancestors alive by telling their stories. In this journal, it is my ancestor telling her own story. With every word of her flowing cursive script, young Helen adds to her remarkable account of life at an elite Canadian girls’ boarding school, more than a century ago.
In preparing the annotated edition, I have preserved, as much as possible, Helen’s idiosyncratic spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and underlining, modifying it only when needed for clarity. Explanatory notes and context appear in italics. Where possible, I’ve included brief biographical notes for some of her teachers, classmates, friends, and family.
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