Jemima Condict

Who was Jemima Condict?

Jemima Condict was born in a rural setting in the mountains of northwestern New Jersey on 24 August 1754. She spent her entire short life in the vicinity of Pleasantdale, New Jersey, dying on 14 November 1779 at the age of twenty-five. Nonetheless, she managed to obtain sufficient education to be able to write with some facility, and obviously felt driven to do so. At the age of seventeen, in the spring of 1772, she began a diary, and made sporadic entries into it for the rest of her life.

Condict titled her diary "J2M3M1 C59D3CT H2R B44K 19D P29," using a code that also appeared in a number of the diary's lines of verse. She used the numbers 1-9 to replace the letters a, e, i, o, u, y, t, s, and n, in that order. Thus, the title reads: "JEMIMA CUNDICT HER BOOK AND PEN". Jemima Condict variously spelled the family's name in her writings as "Cundict", "Condict", and "Condit".

The only published full text of the diary is titled "Her Book, Being a transcript of the diary of an Essex County maid during the Revolutionary War". It was published in a collectors' edition of only 200 copies by the typographer Frederic Goudy and his wife Bertha Goudy.