DyddiadurKate – Tweeting from the past

Throughout 2015 the @DyddiadurKate Twitter account tweeted (in Welsh) the 1915 diary of Kate Rowlands, a farm girl from Sarnau near Bala. A century later, her records have given us a new glimpse into life in Wales during the First World War.

In 1915 Kate ‘Kitty’ Rowlands was an unmarried woman, in her early twenties, living with her parents on a small farm called Ty Hen in the parish of Llanfor. Within the covers of her Welsh-language diary there are brief records of her daily activities – farm and household tasks, seasonal rituals, weather observations, countless chapel meetings, and neighbours coming and going. This was micro-history – the daily happenings of one small community during a turbulent year in mainland Europe. Browsing the pages, it became clear that the content merited further attention. And so the Twitter account @DyddiadurKate started on New Year’s Day 2015. For a full year, National Museum Wales’ team tweeted the content of the diary daily, reaching an audience beyond any reading room or lecture theatre. To coincide with the Twitter account, @DyddiadurKate was a springboard to blog about all sorts of topics during the First World War including public health, recruiting in Merionethshire, the Red Cross and volunteering on the home front, worries about food production and the Fron-goch prison camp. One name or event in the diary would lead us to a local story which, more often than not, mirrored a broader national story.

Above: The diary’s brief entries © Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales Middle: Cover of the 1915 Welsh-language diary of Kate Rowlands, from Sarnau, Meirionnyd from the National History Museum collection © Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales Below: Kate Rowlands in 1969. By this time she had settled in Rhyduchaf © Amgueddfa Cymru –National Museum Wales