This is not a real notebook
It was not written by anyone who lived what it tells. It is a demonstration: an example of what can be made with Vitascriptor, built on a fictional life so that no real family has to lend its own.
The narrator is Anne Shirley, the heroine of L. M. Montgomery’s novels (1874–1942). The six books this notebook draws on — Anne of Green Gables (1908), Anne of Avonlea (1909), Anne of the Island (1915), Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), Rainbow Valley (1919) and Rilla of Ingleside (1921) — are in the public domain in Canada and in the United States.
Two later books about Anne, published in 1936 and 1939, are still under copyright in the United States. Nothing here comes from them.
The texts are new
No sentence of Montgomery’s is used here. The public domain would allow it, but a notebook made of a novel’s text would show a novel copied out — not what a person produces when writing their own. The twenty stories were written for this demonstration, from the situations, people and places of the books.
What comes from the novels: the people and how they are related, the places, the order of events. What does not: the words.
What is known, and what is worked out
The novels name almost no years before the war. Only the last one, Rilla of Ingleside, dates its events: August 1914, 1916, 1917. Everything earlier has been worked back from what the books do say — that Anne was eleven when she came to Green Gables, twenty-five when she married, that her eldest son was twenty-one when the war began. The spans of years on each period, and the years beside some names, are therefore deductions, and a reader of the novels may place things a year or two differently.
Some places are real and sit on the map: Charlottetown, Summerside, Montreal, the camp at Valcartier, Ypres, Courcelette, Vimy Ridge. Many are not. Avonlea, Bright River, Four Winds, Glen St. Mary, Kingsport and the rest are Montgomery’s inventions, even where they resemble real towns; they have their own page and no pin on the map, on purpose.
Dog Monday, who waits at the station for more than four years, is a dog, and is not listed among the people.
The photographs
The photographs are archival documents in the public domain or free of known copyright restrictions, and their source is given beneath every page that shows one. Half of them come from the Wm. Notman & Son studio, around 1910 and 1915, held at the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal. The others are postcards and street views of the time, and wartime photographs held by Library and Archives Canada, the Archives of Ontario and the City of Toronto Archives.
They do not illustrate the scenes told here: they show the country and the time. None of them shows a person from the novels, who never lived.
Vitascriptor
This site was made with Vitascriptor, a tool for writing and gathering a memory notebook together — stories, people, places, photographs — and publishing a site like this one from it.
A notebook stays private by default. Nothing reaches the web without someone choosing it.