Plague

Katherine Rhodes-Fields from The Plague Doctor series. All rights reserved.

What could be more appropriate today than a plague doctor in his mask? It is certainly nothing new in the history of mankind. You might remember my post about how one small town where my Rogers ancestors lived dealt with an outbreak of smallpox. And how some surrounding towns took a more bloodless approach. Check that out here.

The plague of the 19th Century was tuberculosis. Before it was understood that a particular bacteria caused the disease, crowding, poor sanitation and poor hygiene killed large numbers of people in this country who contracted TB. No surprise, when people were removed to cleaner sanitariums they often recovered. I was startled to discover how many of my relatives died of tuberculosis as I worked on my tree. Finding them all to list them would have taken the better part of my month at home. So I chose the most striking examples. I would find some really well-kept registers that listed "consumption" or "phthisis pulmonalis" as the cause of death. That's TB. There were probably many others, but before good records were standardized, an early female death would easily have been either childbirth or TB.

Jennie R Smith- Nov 1880

This is one of the saddest records I found. Jennie was my great-great-grandfather's youngest sister. She died at just nineteen. The worst part was that out of twelve children in this family, only 3 lived to adulthood. Jennie almost made it. On the same page recording her death in Waltham I found many other TB deaths.

Another story was that of the family of Moses Rogers of Holden. He was my third great grandfather's brother. In his family he lost 4 children to tuberculosis, one to typhoid, one to typhus and one to cancer. Seven out of his eight children. Some in adulthood, to be sure, but still... 

I think  about the things that killed people in the 19th century: disease and childbirth. Old age was a luxury. People were accustomed to death in a way we just aren't. And accustomed to outbreaks of diseases we have long left behind. On the register page with Jennie's death I found tubercular meningitis, tuberculosis and six cases of diphtheria.  The outbreak at one point was so severe that people blamed vampires and began doing strange rituals to stop it. You can read about that here. Bleach and toilet paper hoarding may be more logical, but no less hysterical.

Josephine Payne Fitzgerald 1910

This last record is the death of my great-uncle Robert Fitzgerald's wife Josie in 1910. Even then, tuberculosis was taking lives. Her infant son died the same month of  "lumbar pneumonia", but who knows whether she passed it along to him?  Robert was left to raise my cousin Katherine until 1917 when a freak accident killed him and she went to live with my grandparents.

I found stories like this all through the family tree as I have worked along. Now to be sure, tuberculosis was a slow death. People knew the outcome and had some time to accustom themselves to the eventuality; the average TB patient lived three to five years. There were no airplanes. People traveled less. The spread would have been slower. And living in an age where we are inoculated against the biggest killers of previous ages, we have no reference for what we are seeing today.

Here's a thought. Picture your family tree as a very large inverted triangle with you, the "distillation" at the very bottom. That image reminds me again of something that struck me early on in genealogy: I am the result of survival of every possible type of calamity. My ancestors survived pandemics, deaths in accidents, death in childbirth, war, famine  just to name a few. My very existence is a kind of miracle. Until I did genealogy, I never really grasped or appreciated that. 

Today, I do even more.