Early Settlement and the Keeping of Records
The earliest sustained diary-keeping in what is now Canada began with the arrival of European colonists and missionaries in the seventeenth century. Jesuit fathers stationed in New France kept detailed annual relations, sent back to Paris as reports and preserved in the Relations des Jésuites. These were institutional documents, but the daily habit of observation that underpinned them carried over into individual practice. Settlers in Acadia, and later in the St. Lawrence valley, kept household accounts that blurred the line between financial ledger and personal diary. The two forms were not yet fully separate.
The fur trade brought a second stream of writing. Factors and clerks at Hudson's Bay Company posts were expected to maintain daily post journals — systematic records of weather, trade, and personnel. These are held today at the Library and Archives Canada and the Hudson's Bay Company Archives in Winnipeg. They are not diaries in the modern personal sense, but they established a discipline of daily notation that filtered into private practice. Men and women at isolated posts, without other intellectual outlets, began writing beyond what the job required.
The Nineteenth Century: Diaries as a Social Form
By the early nineteenth century, diary-keeping had become widely understood as a respectable and even morally instructive practice. Methodist and other Protestant communities encouraged self-examination in writing; the diary was a place to account for one's conduct and spiritual state. This religious framing gave the private journal a legitimacy it had not always enjoyed. Women in particular adopted the form. Surviving diaries from Upper Canada in the 1820s through 1860s reveal detailed accounts of domestic labour, seasonal cycles, family illness, and neighbourhood relations. They are among the most precise records of rural Ontario life available to historians.
The Confederation period intensified this activity. The political upheaval of the 1860s produced a generation of writers who felt they were living through consequential events and wanted to note them down. Politicians, journalists, and private citizens kept parallel records. The diary of Edmund Morris, a Toronto-born artist who travelled extensively to document Plains peoples in the 1900s, sits at the Royal Ontario Museum and provides one of the more detailed first-hand accounts of that documentation work. His entries are as much artistic record as personal reflection.
The First World War and the Trenches
The First World War produced the largest single volume of personal diary-keeping in Canadian history. Soldiers were technically prohibited from keeping diaries in the field — the concern was that captured documents could convey tactical information to the enemy — but the prohibition was widely ignored. Thousands of notebooks, field diaries, and letter collections survive from Canadian Expeditionary Force soldiers. The Library and Archives Canada holds a large portion of these, and digitization has made many searchable.
These wartime diaries have a specific texture. Entries are often brief — a date, a location, a note about the weather and the rations. The compression reflects both the exhaustion of the writers and the conditions under which they wrote: in dugouts, in borrowed light, on whatever paper came to hand. Over time, the accumulation of brief entries constitutes a detailed record. Researchers working with these collections have been able to reconstruct daily life in the trenches at a resolution that unit war diaries — the official military records — cannot provide.
Interwar and Mid-Century
The interwar decades produced diaries shaped by economic precarity. The Depression years in the Prairie provinces generated a significant body of personal writing. Farm women in Saskatchewan and Alberta kept records of crop failures, debt notices, and mutual aid among neighbours. These are functional documents in many respects — tracking resources, creditors, and the movement of livestock — but they also contain passages of considerable personal candour. Several collections have been published or excerpted in regional archives journals.
The mid-century decades saw diary-keeping persist as a private practice even as new mass media claimed more of daily attention. Radio and, later, television did not displace the handwritten journal; if anything, some diarists recorded their responses to these new media, making their notebooks a record of cultural change as well as personal circumstance. Diaries from the 1950s held at provincial archives in British Columbia and Nova Scotia frequently document the arrival of television in rural communities, the appearance of new consumer goods, and shifts in the rhythm of the working week.
Contemporary Survival of the Form
Handwritten diaries have not disappeared. Sales of ruled notebooks and fountain pens in Canada have grown steadily since the mid-2010s, a trend documented by stationery retailers and industry surveys. The reasons offered for this persistence vary: some writers cite the physicality of the act, the absence of digital distraction, the permanence of ink on paper. Others describe the notebook as a space where writing is not subject to search, indexing, or inadvertent sharing — a private channel with no algorithm.
Canadian institutions continue to acquire personal diary collections. The Archives of Ontario and city archives in Vancouver, Calgary, and Halifax all have active acquisition programmes for personal papers, of which diaries are a significant component. The challenge is not finding material but managing a volume that continues to accumulate faster than existing cataloguing infrastructure can process it.