Not only what we think
To keep readers from feeling bereft while The Legal Genealogist is on the road, the blog over the next week or so will continue to focus on terms — words and phrases — we may come across in legal documents that don’t always mean what we think they mean.
Words like today’s term of the day: quarantine.
We all think we know what quarantine means, and — for the most part — we do.
It’s that time period during which people or animals who were — or were thought to be — infected with a contagious disease would be isolated away from others in order to prevent the spread of the disease, right? That, after all, is the basic dictionary definition.1
My own grandmother, as a child, had been quarantined with her family in the brand new State of Oklahoma just after her father had homesteaded as a successful bidder in the Big Pasture land sale there. The disease: smallpox.2 It was an horrific experience she never forgot.
The term has a somewhat more specific definition in the legal sense, from a maritime origin:
A period of time (theoretically forty days) during which a vessel coming from a place where a contagious or infectious disease is prevalent, is detained by authority in the harbor of her port of destination, or at a station near it, without being permitted to land or to discharge her crew or passengers. Quarantine is said to have been first established at Venice in 1484.3
But that’s not all it means, in a legal sense.
There’s an alternate definition in the context of real property — land — where we as genealogists may come up against it as well.
In that context, it means the “space of forty days during which a widow has a right to remain in her late husband’s principal mansion immediately after his death. The right of the widow is also called her ‘quarantine.’”4
Remember that, for generations, women living in common law jurisdictions — England, the United States, Canada, Australia and elsewhere — didn’t inherit from their husbands. They may have cleared the land, planted the land, lived on the land, raised kids on the land — but they didn’t own the land and it didn’t pass to them when their husbands died.5
Their rights were limited to whatever the law of dower gave them — usually a life estate in one-third of their husband’s lands.6 And, if they were lucky, that life estate would include the house (that principal mansion). But even if it didn’t, quarantine was the right not to have to leave that house for a time after the husband’s death.
Not quite the concept we have in mind when we hear the word, is it?
But one we need to know.
SOURCES
Image: Flickr.com, user Monado, CC BY-SA 2.0
- See Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary (http://www.m-w.com : accessed 4 June 2015), “quarantine.” ↩
- Homestead Proof–Testimony of Claimant, 29 August 1908, Jasper C. Robertson (Tillman County, Oklahoma), cash sale entry, certificate no. 246, Lawton, Oklahoma, Land Office; Land Entry Papers, 1800-1908; Records of the Bureau of Land Management; Record Group 49, National Archives, Washington, D.C. ↩
- Henry Campbell Black, A Dictionary of Law (St. Paul, Minn. : West, 1891), 975-976, “quarantine.” ↩
- Ibid. ↩
- See generally Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986). ↩
- Ibid. ↩
As a small child of about 4 living in San Francisco, our house was quarantined because I had Scarlet Fever. I remember the large quarantine sign put on the house by the steps and the front door. We had our milk and cream delivered and the empty bottles were not put out for the milk man to pick as was usual and, ince we had an icebox, the iceman had to leave the large block of ice on the porch for my parents to pick up and put in the icebox. No one ws allowed to leave the house, so my grandmother did the grocery shopping and left the box of groceries on the front porch. I remember having to stay in a dark bedroom with the windows covered and wasn’t supposed to read, but I was not always compliant with the “not-reading” part, so consequently my eyes were affected tremendously, causing me to wear thick glasses from a very young age. I can’t remember how long the quarantine lasted, but it seemed like forever to a child. Thanks for the memories.
Good to know. If I was to read that a widow was under quarantine, it would be easy to jump to conclusions about the husband’s cause of death. This sheds a new light on it.
Thanks, Judy. I had seen the term quarantine in relation to ships, but had no idea of its legal meaning in land inheritance and the impact on women. I am sure to run into that as my research gets more detailed. Black’s Legal Dictionary is on my list of get-soons. You are keeping me on my toes.
BTW, my first reaction was one of remembrance too. In the late 40s, my poor mom was stuck in the house with 3 under five (I was the five-year old with a mild casw of scarlet fever). My dad would leave groceries on the porch for us. He and mom would have conversations, she from an open window, he standing on the sidewalk before he left to spend the night with a coworker. How relieved they must have been when the quarantine notice came down. Especially Mom.
Very interesting.
According to Google, in Italian “quarantina” literally means forty days, so obviously the concept of quarantine being for forty days came before the word did. Which came first, quarantine for ships or quarantine for widows? And why 40 days?
For me, too, the word brought memories, one for me, and one my mother told me. When I was a young child, the three of us were quarantined because of an illness at least two of us had–probably when my brother and I had the mumps at the same time. Since my parents had both had them, they could come and go. So could the doctor; the only time I remember house calls (the 1950s). My sister didn’t get them from us but later brought them home from school and infected a neighbor man, who was a lot sicker than my sister. It took me years to understand the jokes between the four parents, since this couple’s only child was adopted!
My mother’s family was quarantined in 1919 in a small town in Alberta when my grandmother and all five children got the Spanish flu. The town was a railroad hub, and soldiers/sailors on their way home from WW I who were transferring trains were probably the source of the contagion. My grandfather didn’t get sick, but was quarantined with the family–or chose to stay with them to take care of them, since my grandmother was very ill for a long time. The kids bounced back quickly, but had to be quiet for their mother’s sake. Neighbors left food and ice on the porch and ran, as my mother recalled. The doctor came in, though.
I knew of the maritime use of the term, since I’ve had friends who moved to countries with such quarantines for animals, who had to give up beloved pets. But I had no idea of the use for widows. How fascinating–and frightening for the women affected.