Historical Tidbits: Children's Games

Daily Diary, April 18, 2022, Day 596: My experiment with starting my writing week on a Saturday worked splendidly. Over the weekend, I wrote 2,188 new words on my story, Mrs. Stein Solves a Crime. I also maintained a good schedule of walking, PT exercises, and I almost finished the audiobook I am listening to and still took a few phone calls from friends who needed to talk.

I even took the time to go on a few research side trips, which can often get me off track when writing. In this case, I went down the rabbit hole looking for examples of 19th century finger games people played with children.. This started when I had Mrs. Stein play “patty-cake,” with Abigail, who is just over one in this story. I looked up patty-cake in the Ngram google search site that tells you how often a term is used by year (to make sure it is historically accurate.) I found that in 1882 this was very obscure term (compared to now.) So then I had to research finger games in general to see what would be familiar. One thing I discovered was that this game was called “pat-a-cake” back then, but I also found a great book that listed favorite finger games for children. Fingers Plays: For Nursery and Kindergarten by Emilie Poulsson was published in 1893, and it has illustrations, music, and words for seventeen different children’s games. The one I was familiar with was called “All for Baby” and I've added the illustrations below. I would love for you to check out the link and tell me if any of the games were familiar to you in the comments!