For Halloween…
You can blame FamilySearch for this.
Its blogger Nathan W. Murphy started it three years ago.
But The Legal Genealogist couldn’t resist then picking up the challenge and sending it on — and can’t resist now adding to it.
So… here on Halloween, here’s what I know about what caused my ancestors’ deaths.
I don’t have nearly as much information as Nathan has, but I have picked up a bit more from German records.
What ghoulish information do you have about what caused YOUR ancestors’ deaths?
Just about everybody in my direct ancestral line died in bed of old age. So boring! (sigh)…. But a few branches of the family tree did manage to wipe out in more creative ways.
One young man went out for a stroll with his fiancee on the railroad tracks and didn’t get out of the way fast enough. Two Canadian cousins from Saint John, NB decided to run the Reversing Falls in a canoe, and didn’t make it. One gguncle fell overboard from a ship midway between New Zealand and Australia. Another more distant relation was killed when a tunnel collapsed on a section of the track where he was working on a railroad construction project.
That’s a sad collection!
The saddest is actually a story I found about one of my 4xggrandfathers, “He was a soldier in the French War of 1754, leaving his wife and five children at home in good health, on his return he was met at the door by his wife only; his children had all died during his absence of malignant dysentery, or as it was then called camp distemper.”
The good news is he and his moved to a new home and went on to have 6 more children who survived to marry and have children of their own.
TB wiped out most of an extended family on my maternal grandfather’s side in MO in the 1880s-1890s. One of the men in that family had the initials “T.B.” and he used those initials to refer to himself. Of course, the disease was called consumption at that time. I also have an ancestor who died in an avalanche on a train and another one who died in an accident with a runaway horse and wagon.
Grandparents Generation: Age (94, 91), Age/Stroke (88), Not Seeing Doctors/Cancer (77) – if you are dead within 48 hours of cancer discovery, you had it for quite a while
Greatgrandparents: Coal damp while attempting a mine rescue (51), Heart attack/arteriosclerosis (75), Acute Poliomyelitis (52), Age (90), unknown x4
Great-great grandparents: Exposure after shipwreck (58), Cardio-renal disease (81), intestinal nephritis & arteriosclerosis (83), hit by a car while pedestrian (75), bus crashed into a car (77), myocarditis (85), arteriosclerosis (90), penumonia (79), unknown x8
My great-aunt’s memoirs (written in the 1960s) included this: “Kyrle Simons in service in India rode 200 miles to greet his wife coming down from the hills, reined up outside the station and dropped dead.” I checked (he was a remote cousin). His death certificate of 26th April 1884 states as cause of death: “Nervous exhaustion the result of exposure to the sun while enduring great fatigue without food.”
))This is a worthwhile project, and not ghoulish at all. My dr encouraged me to create such a chart for my family. This in context of a discussion about the fact that my first genealogy chart was tracing a genetic anomaly through several generations of my family when I was 12! She told me that was a good idea, and suggested that I do the same for causes of death and life-altering illnesses for as many members of my family as I can. About the same time, I received a copy of a book by a cancer researcher, who asked me to review it. The book was about cancers with a genetic componant (which my family has), and suggests ways of recording all cancers, but encouraged recording all illnesses, as my dr had. (The book is
“A Cancer in the Family”, by Theodora Ross, MD, PhD. Subtitled “Take Control of Your Genetic Inheritance”, available at amazon. Well worth reading for anyone, because often one does not see the pattern until one gets them down in a chart and can see the patterns. It applies to many disorders with genetic componants, not just cancer. My dr appreciated the chart, as it helps her understand the nature of my health (sorry for the split message: my computer assistant JellyBean jostled my elbow just then.)
To Annie Stratton: Scratch JellyBean behind the ears for the rest of us who have similar computer-sewing-knitting-cooking assistants!
While scanning a stack of photos I inherited from my maternal grandmother (a long-awaited project that is finally getting started a year into my retirement) I found a woman I had never heard of. It turns out she was a second wife to my great-grandfather. Per her obit, she was struck by an automobile while attempting to board a trolley car and she died at the age of 44. I haven’t yet found a marriage date, but she was part of the family for less than five years (assuming a year between the death of the first wife and the marriage to the second).