ABSTRACT
Small pocket-books, with room for recording the days' appointments or events on one side and space for recording expenditures on the other, were popular throughout the eighteenth century. It is clear that Anne Tracy kept a diary before 1723, but since it does not survive it is not clear when she began to do so. Anne Tracy, the oldest child of John Tracy and Anne Atkyns, was born on 15 January 1705 in Lower Swell in Gloucestershire. The diary is full of the details about her family's activities and movements. Overall the diary shows a young woman learning the household management skills required of genteel women, and recognizing that if 'everything went on as usual', as she once wrote, it was because she and others undertook the labour to ensure it did. A note about people and events mentioned in the diary: where possible they have been described in the notes, but many of them could not be definitively identified.
