This sub-series consists of seven personal diaries, a travel log, a cash book, and a commonplace book, which document Robert Hume's life in England and Canada. In total, the diaries contain about 1,600 pages of handwritten entries dating from 1834 to 1867. Hume began keeping a diary when he was age 16 and apprenticed to a farmer to follow the vocation he had chosen for himself. The diaries are an exceptional source for understanding daily life in the 19th century and how the vagaries of political and economic events affected an ordinary person. They provide a wealth of detail about agriculture in Ontario and northern England and reveal his mixture of motivations in emigrating to British North America. The sub-series includes two "travel logs" for 1836 to 1838, which partially duplicate his diaries for the period when he first visited North America.
After three years of his apprenticeship which he described as among the happiest of his life, Hume embarked by ship in March 1836 for Montreal armed with letters of introduction from his friends and family to their kin and acquaintances in North America. He planned to tour Ontario, Ohio and other parts of America, to see if he could make his way in the new world, pass a winter and then return in the spring to England if he did not like the country. He described his voyage, arrival at the quarantine station at Grosse Ile, travels in Upper Canada, employment as a servant and farm labourer in the vicinity of Cobourg and Port Hope, the outbreak of the rebellion in Upper Canada in December 1837, and his return to England in 1838.
Hume returned to Ontario in late 1845 to purchase a farm in Hamilton township in the Cobourg area. Entries from December 1845 to March 1846 show him trying obtain land by purchase or rent for the coming year on favourable terms. He examined several farms in different localities and made a number of offers. The diary offers an strong sense of the land market in Upper Canada and its operation. Subsequent diaries reveal his farming experiences and his keen interest in all aspects of agriculture. Diary entries discuss the work done in the field that day, the success or failure of different varieties of grains and vegetables, the relative merits of different soils, the rotation of crops, animal husbandry, and scarcity of farm labour. But Hume also reveals his interest in political economy in discussions of the deleterious impact of the extension of the franchise to the gold standard's impact on the depreciation of land values.