Until We Sleep Our Last Sleep

Until We Sleep Our Last Sleep: My Quaker Grandmother's Diary of Faith and Community, Amid Depression and Disability

This diary of a Quaker woman covers the years 1889 to 1930.

Winner of the 2020 North Carolina Genealogical Society Award for Excellence in Publishing: "A Publication Relevant to North Carolina Genealogy. The Awards Committee found the transcribed diary an intriguing look into the life of a Quaker woman that would be of interest to anyone studying the social history of this time period and community."

Though you wouldn’t know it from her diary, Emily Millikan Blair was a descendant of North Carolina’s Millikan and Blair families who saved patriots during the Revolutionary War, and supported the abolitionist movement of the Civil War. While she mentions many relations, she does not boast of their contribution to history.

Instead, she writes of her devotion to her husband, John Addison Blair, her Quaker church Springfield Friends, New Garden Boarding School (which later becomes Guilford College) and, most prominently, God.

As a whole, the diary might feel like an anthropological study of Quaker womanhood, but Emily doesn’t cook or bake, wash, clean or raise her children as most women in her community. She was a farmer’s wife and, though disabled, she gave birth to five children. She writes honestly about her physical challenges and depression in plain Quaker speak. She shares daily gratitude to God for each day she is permitted to live and records deaths as an almost devotional practice.

The diary is exact and unedited. These are her words, as she wrote them over a century ago, yet her message of daily self encouragement and appreciation are timeless.