On this website you will find the travel diaries of Aaron Tomberg ( 1884 - 1945 ). Aaron Tomberg was my great uncle, the brother of my paternal grandfather. Although I never met him, I had often heard growing up about Aaron Tomberg the world traveler and scholar. As a frequent traveler myself, I feel a certain affinity to the man.

Recently I came into possession of a copy of some of Aaron's travel diaries. My girlfriend Susan and I have transcribed them from the original handwritten form, and added a few explanatory comments. The results are on this web site.

The diaries are fragmentary. They contain accounts of about eleven days of his travels in Europe in the summers of 1909, 1910 and probably 1911. There are three fragments in all, each comprising several handwritten pages in a small brown notebook. The first two fragments include dates with years, but the third only contains a date and a day, "Saturday July 1". Since July 1 fell on a Saturday in 1911, I provisionally assign that year to the last fragment.

To the left of the transcribed text, you will find thumbnail photos of the actual journal entries in Aaron's own handwriting. You can click on these images for a closer look, and then click on the bigger image for a very large version of the page. In some cases the text entries span more than one journal page. In several cases, I took a few words from the next or previous page to finish a sentence. All the journal pages that pertain to the text are displayed.

The page numbers associated with the pages refer to the order in which I photographed the journal and some of Aaron's other writings. Therefore, the page numbers for his journal do not start with one and are not always in order.

Some of the words in the diary are difficult to decipher. I put question marks next to the words I was particularly unsure of. The mark looks like this: [?] . My few editorial comments are in brackets and marked as "Ed." As in [Comment, Ed.] . In a few cases, I regularized the spelling in the journals, but otherwise I made no other modifications. I did not fix all the spelling or grammatical mistakes in the journal.

There is a record of Aaron returning home from his 1910 trip in the Ellis Island archives. You can view it by clicking here. They also have records pertaining to his trips of 1907 and 1913. You can view the original ship manifest entries by clicking the thumbnail images to the left.

Aaron often mentions the price of things in his journals. For reference, according to Economic History Services, $1.00 in 1909 would have the same buying power as $19.40 in 2002.

I hope you find this journal interesting. I know I did. If you know about any additional writings of Aaron Tomberg, please let me know.

To learn more about Aaron, you can read "Aaron Tomberg Remembered By His Nephew, Martin Tomberg".

Oh, and you can view the travel logs from my own trips at http://travel.ctomberg.com.

-Charlie Tomberg
charlie_tomberg@yahoo.com