Life back in the 1860s was far different than it is today. We may not be able to relate to how our ancestors lived back then, and certainly they would never have imagined the way we live in our society today. Not long ago, I spent some time reading two small old diaries that were kept by my great-great grandfather Stoddard Dickinson, who lived in Shalersville in Portage County. While the writing is sometimes hard to read and his entries were brief, one can get a picture of the way he and some of his family lived. Stoddard was born in 1799 in Old Milford, Conn. Our records do not show when he migrated to the Portage County area. A number of New Englanders came west to Ohio in the early to mid-1800s in search of cheaper and more productive farm land. As was true of probably 80 percent of our 1860s population, Stoddard was a farmer. His Portage County farm was a productive one on some of the sandy soils of the Shalersville area.