The next picture in the album features Catharine Dusenberry Sly holding granddaughter, Mary, on her lap. If I’ve got Mary’s birth date correct, then the year should be 1909. Grandma Sly, born in 1840, will live four more years while Mary will live another ninety or so.
Birth dates and dates of death are, obviously, an important part of genealogical research. For each relative you look up, you get the date and then do a quick mental calculation. “OK, 1840-1913 so she was…73 when she died”.
Soon enough, though, you dread doing those calculations. As you go, you’ll find a date of death that looks too close to the date of birth and realize that this was a child who died. So many years later, not even knowing the people intimately, it can be very upsetting.
Yet this was a part of life even well into the period that these photographs were taken. A cure for tuberculosis, for example, wasn’t tried on a human patient until 1949. It wasn’t even discovered until 1882, at which point it caused the death of one out of every seven people living in the U.S. and Europe.
According to records, grandma Sly lost two of her own children. Eleanor (my great-grandmother) was her eldest child. He was followed by James Clark (baby Mary’s father) three years later. The two children after that died early.
First, she lost baby William in 1878, at 7 months of age. Then, four years later, she lost Clara Harlow , who was only 6. These babies were buried with she and her husband, Jacob, at Warwick cemetery. (You can view the gravestone here if you wish).
I’m really not well-versed in death, if you want to put it that way. Some things I talk about all the time…books, recipes, financial data (!)…but nothing about my current situation leads me to have conversations about the end of one’s life. I’m grateful for that.
I mean, really! It’s been over 10 years since my grandma’s death and I’m just now able to dig out her album and process it!
As ever, I think my ancestors were made of stronger stuff. Catharine made it through what must have been a horrific five years and went on to live over thirty more. Counting Mary, there would be five grandchildren to hold on her lap: five squirming, crying, amazing beings that would go on to outlive her.
I’ve decided to let a quote from Willa Cather do the wrapping up for me today. Willa was, coincidentally, born on a farm herself, a year before my great-grandmother Eleanor. Her family moved to Nebraska when she was nine to avoid the – yes – tuberculosis outbreaks that were occurring in Virginia.
Though the novel My Antonia, from which I quote, was not published until 1918, by 1909 she was already working nearby, in New York City. I wish you all a good weekend, a long, healthy life and (since we’re on the subject) a peaceful death when it comes, as it must.
“I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
My Antonia by Willa Cather