128 years ago today
Yesterday, we are told, was National Siblings Day.
Not a formal official holiday in any sense, but a day when we can all celebrate our siblings.
A day The Legal Genealogist always has fun with … with seven siblings, I can be mad at half of them at any given moment and still be able to scrounge enough for a pickup basketball game.
But it’s also a day when I always think about the siblings that were lost.
Such as the little boy lost to my family 128 years ago today.
Sammie was the sixth of the 10 known children of my great grandparents, Martin Gilbert and Martha “Mattie” (Johnson) Cottrell, born on 5 May 1887,1 probably in Clay County, Texas. That’s where his parents and older siblings had been recorded in the 1880 census,2 and the family isn’t found in the records of Wichita County, Texas, until 1889.3
And he was just about three weeks shy of his fifth birthday when he died, 128 years ago today, on 11 April 1892. He was buried in the family plot, where his grandfather was already interred, at Highland Cemetery in Iowa Park, Wichita County, Texas.4
Had he lived, he’d have been 11 years old when the youngest child of that family — my grandfather, Clay Rex Cottrell — was born in 1898.5 And you can’t help but wonder… how different would my grandfather’s life have been, had Sammie lived?
Would this have been the brother he looked up to? Who let him tag along sometimes?
Is this the one who’d have taught him to fish? Or walked him to school on his first day?
Is this the one he’d have brought his troubles to? Sought guidance and advice from?
Just how would this sibling have changed things… if things had been changed… if he had lived?
We’ll never know, of course. So we record instead the little we do know.
Sammie.
Born 1887.
Died 1892.
And loved. Oh so very loved. Because of all the family deaths in those years this little boy is the only one whose grave is marked by a stone, placed at the time:
Sammie Cottrell, 1887-1892
The inscription at the bottom of the stone reads:
We miss thee from our home, dear Sammie,
We miss thee from thy place,
A shadow on our life is cast,
We miss the sunshine of thy face.
A sibling, loved… and lost.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “A sibling… loved and lost,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 11 Apr 2020).
SOURCES
- Highland Cemetery (Iowa Park, Wichita County, Texas; on Rodgers Road 0.1 mile west of the intersection with Bell Road North, Latitude 33.96704, Longitude -98.6595041), Sammie Cottrell marker; photograph by J.G. Russell, 9 Nov 2002 ↩
- 1880 U.S. census, Clay County, Texas, Precinct 4, population schedule, enumeration district (ED) 164, p. 492(B) (stamped), dwelling 17, family 17, M.G. Cottrell household; digital image, Ancestry.com (https://www.ancestry.com : accessed 11 Apr 2020); citing National Archive microfilm publication T9, roll 1296. ↩
- The first recorded transaction was a deed showing Sammie’s father, M.G. Cottrell, as grantee. Wichita County, Texas, Deed Book O: 64-65, 19 Sep 1889; County Clerk’s Office, Wichita Falls. ↩
- Highland Cemetery (Iowa Park, Wichita Co., Tex.), Sammie Cottrell marker. ↩
- See Virginia Department of Health, Certificate of Death, state file no. 70-026729, Clay Rex Cottrell (21 Sep 1970); Division of Vital Records, Richmond. ↩
Sammie’s post brought to mind a painful, similar situation. My grandfather told me, years ago, that he had a sister Lucille that died from the Spanish flu. Years later, I stumbled upon grandaunt Lucille’s death certificate on FamilySearch that stated she died in December 1918 from the flu. My heart sank when I saw the burial date – 1 January 1919. I can’t even come close to imagining what my great-grandparents felt when they had to begin the new year with a burial – she was 10 years old. Like Sammie, Aunt Lucille was enumerated in the 1910 census; so, at least I know for a short time that she lived.
I remember, also, my granduncle Blaine told me he had a younger sibling that died as a child as well; and, I found the birth and death registers for Uncle Maurice. I remember Uncle Blaine shaking his head with sadness telling me about it.
My great-great grandparents had eight children, only the two oldest and the two youngest survived to adulthood. The other four middle children died before 1880. Three of the girls died from childhood diseases like whooping cough, fever, etc.; the other boy, I know nothing of him at all – probably died as well because he did not appear in the 1880 census like his sisters that died before him.
It’s always painful when we find a child who was born and died between the censuses… it’s almost as if fate was conspiring to erase their lives entirely.
I was named for my mother’s little sister, who died on my mother’s 5th birthday. I always assumed it was pneumonia, flu or something contagious. When I found her death certificate, it said she had died suddenly of a heart attack. (a cousin who is a doctor deciphered the cause.) My mother was always fearful of something happening to us kids and had to know where we were every second. I never understood it until I had kids of my own and had seen that death certificate.
From an early age I grew up hearing about my mother’s older sister, Eleanor Jane, who died at aged six weeks. My mother’s recollection of the details were that a family friend came to visit the baby and infected her with whooping cough. However the death certificate lists the cause of death as acute bronchitis and bronchial pneumonia with myocardial insufficiency as a contributing factor. What ever the reason it was a sad end to a brief life. I often wonder if my grandparents would have had my mother when they did considering the short amount of time between that baby’s death and my mother’s birth. At any rate, when my mother died I made sure to include Eleanor Jane in her obituary. She may have only lived six weeks but she needed to be remembered.
Good for you. My grandparents also lost two children — their first-born Ruth as an infant and then a two-year-old in 1932. We made darned sure to have both of them mentioned in my grandmother’s obituary and in the obits of those children’s siblings.
A sibling of mine drew breath for only an hour or so. The custom back then was for all neo-natal deaths, both still-born and those who died just after birth; to be kept from the mother’s view and buried anonymously and secretly in a mass grave.
Not being able to see her child or her grave was an ongoing (but fortunately minor) item of grief for my mother.
Ideas have changed. Although founded long, long ago, Ballarat New Cemetery, (Victoria, Australia) for one, now has a section for the interment of such early deaths as well as for the memorialisation of some who disappeared under previous custom. It’s a much happier way to remember.