Death and Children

One of the interesting parts of writing these Good Old Days stories is the questions people ask. This gets me looking into something I had never thought of.

A few months ago, I received a phone call from a student from this area who was enrolled at Eastern Illinois University. She was doing some research that involved visiting a local rural cemetery. She found what she considered a large number of young people that had died in one year in the 1800's. She wondered if it was because of some sort of epidemic. I told her I would try and find out. This is where her question led me.

I found a book in the genealogy room at the Odell Library that had been researched by Jayne Sweger of Sterling, in 1972, and had been put into book form for the Library in 1977 by Morrison's “super historian,” Arlene Onken. Ms. Sweger had researched the Sterling Gazette and the Whiteside Sentinel, the two major newspapers in Whiteside County, between 1856 and 1881. She recorded all the deaths that were reported during that time.

Realize, this is not highly scientific research, because there were undoubtedly deaths that weren't reported to the newspapers. I found some that were in neighboring counties. This information should, however, give us a pretty good idea of what was happening during those 25 years.

I went through the approximately 2000 deaths that were reported. I picked out all of those that were young people under 20 years of age. I came up with 414 deaths out of those 2000 that fit that age group---better than one in five was a young person!

I didn't find any sort of specific epidemic, just that children were dying from what seemed a constant epidemic of “everything.” The causes were given as cholera, diphtheria, meningitis, scarlet fever, death at birth, typhoid, consumption, and, of course, accidents.

Often there would be more than one in a family that died from the same disease. There was one family that lost three children over a five year period. There was a family south of Morrison that lost five of their six children from scarlet fever. I found one death notice in 1876 that said one child had died and their five other children were sick.

There were also deaths from accidents. A 13 year old boy was killed while plowing, because the team ran away. I found two cases where two young boys were walking on the ice and fell through and drowned. I also found a couple of young children that had fallen into tubs of hot water that was being heated to do the family wash. I think you get the idea.

I think this is a good example of how many of those old days were "Bad Old Days". How lucky we are that we live in a time when we have medicine and vaccines that have eliminated these deadly diseases from our lives. There may be some groups that frown on some of the vaccinations, and the kids may not appreciate it at the time, since that needle hurts for a few seconds. The real hurt is that there are still so many places in the world where our story of the 1800's is their story of 2007.

Makes us stop and think how lucky we really are, doesn't it? Next month I will try and have a happy story.

(by Orville Goodenough, Guest Columnist)