And you thought you had a hard life

Being a detailed analytic person is both a blessing and a curse when tracing a family tree. I’ve mentioned before that of late I’m extending the family tree not just back to direct ancestors across and down at each generation as far as I can to uncover the various aunts uncles and cousins in each generation. Part of this research usually results in finding various details about lives that jump out until a story to me. Usually the stories are tragic. I recently hit one that just struck me as being exceedingly sad.

I was working on the descendents of one particular 5^th great uncle on the paternal side and hit upon a fourth cousin twice removed whose data nearly broke my heart. Every detail I uncovered made the story all the sadder.

The first thing that jumped out was that she died tragically young. Just twenty-five years old. That alone would tell sad tale. But there was more.

The second thing I noticed was that she left a son behind a mere 4 years old at her death. But the tragic details kept coming.

I then noticed that she lost a child who did not even live long enough to be named. Even the child's sex was not recorded. It was merely noted as "Infant". But still there was more.

She had died a scant eight days after giving birth to that second child, a child who would survive her only fourteen more days.

It is a fairly common practice for a mother and child who die in close proximity to each other to be buried together. Unfortunately given the two-week gap between their passings almost certainly meant that they were buried separately, though in the same family cemetery. This is one of the cemeteries I sought to locate and better document recently but was unsuccessful due to the difficulty in accessing it. So I do not know if there are even markers for the graves there. What little is recorded states that there is an iron fence surrounding the cemetery, but there are no photographs or notation of headstones.

On one side of the tragedy we have two most untimely deaths. On the other we have two survivors-the husband and the firstborn child. Even this side of the story doesn’t exactly end well.

At the time of the two passings the couple and their child were living with her parents (my third cousin three times removed and his wife). This was in 1906. The 1910 census shows the father and son still living with his in-laws. By the 1920 census the widower had remarried (around 1917) and fathered two more daughters. The entire family was now living with his parents. The daughters appeared in the census as nine months and two years ten months respectively.

But history was to repeat itself all too soon. He died in 1928 leaving the son technically orphaned (both biological parents having died) but mercifully an adult in his mid-20s. The two daughters were left with her mother both being under the age of ten.

The family was not even to be reunited in death. Aside from the mother and daughter being buried in the same family cemetery, the remaining family were interred in separate cemeteries.

In an odd coincidence the father was to be buried in a church cemetery a relative few miles from his distant cousins living near and buried in the Smith Family/Wolfskin cemetery I have mentioned in previous entries.

I still have work to do to complete the research on this family unit. But even this much of the story reinforces my desire to inspect, document, and photograph that family cemetery that eluded me in my first attempt. If I find that there are no markers then that will simply be the capstone on the list of tragedies in their story.