Grandma’s diaries gain a following

Mark McKinney never knew his maternal grandmother, Elisabeth Hartsell, but he’s using her diaries to make her a social media star.

McKinney and his friend Liz Duren, both of Charleston, S.C., are the duo behind My Grandma’s Diaries, a project that has more than 300,000 followers on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram and explores the diaries that Missouri native Hartsell began keeping in 1931, when she was 13, through 1942, when she stopped. Along the way she and her family lived in Monticello and in Steprock in White County, where they picked cotton and strawberries.

Hartsell was writing during the Great Depression — which hit her family hard and at one point found her living in a tent in Steprock — through the start of World War II. It’s a fascinating time capsule and we follow along as she grows from a kind, popular teenager hanging out with her friends into a young woman during a particularly tumultuous era.

Along with their social media posts, in which Duren reads from diary entries and McKinney creates videos from family photos and other sources, the pair are 13 episodes into a weekly podcast in which they dive deeper into the diaries. On the podcast, which can be found on all the popular platforms, Duren not only reads Hartsell’s words, but she also investigates many of the friends, crushes and family members Hartsell mentions, using sites like ancestry.com and newspapers.com to find out who they were and what they did.

There is a page at patreon.com where subscribers can get bonus materials about Hartsell’s story.

Hartsell was 51 when she died in her sleep in Missouri in 1969, about a year before McKinney was born. His mom gave the diaries to him and his brother several years ago, but it wasn’t until he showed them to Duren that the project took off.

“This is the kind of stuff I live for,” says Duren, who was adopted and spent nearly 30 years searching for her birth mother. “I love detective work and finding out about family histories.”

McKinney says the diaries have taught him a lot about his grandma.

“I knew very little of her. I knew she was this beautiful woman who sat by our telephone in a photograph. When we opened up these diaries it was all new. … It’s been a wild ride and it’s brought the family together.”

As for the project’s popularity — the TikTok post of Hartsell’s Jan. 9, 1933, diary entry has almost 10 million views — Duren and McKinney have a few thoughts.

“It’s a universal story of a teenager,” he says. “And we realized that it’s not just an incredible story, but she was a beautiful person on top of that.”

“I think everybody has a grandma,” Duren adds, “and they wish they could have heard stories like these from their grandma.”