Still Shaking the Family Tree

Reading about someone's family tree is nearly as bad as being forced to watch the video of someone's grandchild's birthday party, but I'm writing to show how genealogy can connect people to the big events of history. In Mock Trial we have a magic phrase to avoid any hearsay objections: "Not for the truth of the matter asserted, Your Honor." Today's blog is not offered for the truth of my family tree, but as an example of what you can dig up with a little research and an account at Ancestry.com and the New England Historic Genealogical Society

As I noted yesterday, I'm listening to an audiotape called "The Great Influenza." I wouldn't recommend it because it is poorly edited and tends to get lost in dozens of names of doctors in the public health service. It is interesting, however, for the background it provides on medical practice in the Progressive Era right before the war. To sum up, conditions were horrible with most medical schools not much more than diploma mills. Something called the Flexner Report studied these schools, and its revelations shocked the country. I was already familiar with this report because my great-great granduncle Herbert Hands had attended one of those schools and became a doctor (along with his wife).

Yeah, who really knows or cares about great-great grand uncles, but the interesting thing here is Dr. Hands died at the end of September, 1918 and my dad was born in January, 1919 and got stuck with the name Herbert. My mom was born in December, 1918 or "right after the Sox won the World Series" as she liked to say. She lived to be only 82 so you know what that means. As you may remember, the great flu epidemic struck Massachusetts beginning in late August and peaked in September-November. Although the cause of death for Dr. Hands was listed as heart disease, one wonders whether flu played a role. As a doctor he must have been overwhelmed with patients who needed night and day care, and he might have contracted flu himself. I'll try to track down the obituary, but it is unlikely to tell me what I want to know since government censorship (to keep up morale for the war effort) forced papers to downplay the epidemic's devastation. At least that's what the audiobook says, I remember researching the epidemic years ago and finding the Enterprise pretty frank about the large tent hospital that was put up at the Brockton Fair Grounds.

The Great Influenza was unusual among flu virus for it struck down people in the prime of life rather than the elderly and the very young. The audiobook notes that a particularly hard hit subset of "prime of life" folks were pregnant women. Many pregnant women died and more miscarried as the result of the disease so with both grandmothers pregnant at the time, I'm lucky to be here. No stories were passed down in the family (no stories of the epidemic at all) so this was apparently not as close a call for my genes as the time a pioneer got tomahawked to death very, very shortly after impregnating his wife. The pioneer's wife not the tomahawker's.

Dr. Herbert had a son George, don't make me pull out the chart and figure out what kind of cousin he was, who continued the family's non-military career path. In his case he may have missed the draft as the sole surviving son of the family. George apparently lived until 1970, but I never knew him nor whether he had any children or grandchildren. His name doesn't pop up in the 1930 census or Social Security death records so I need to review that 1970 death date. Who knows what relatives may be lurking out there.

Herbert and Frederick were both immigrants and they left a brother Sydney behind in England. Sydney's descendents looked like the last chance for heroic Hands war service in WWI, but checking out my grandfather Carville Hands' draft record, the name of Coleman Hands popped up. My grandfather's first name (and my middle one) came from his grandmother's maiden name. Coleman was that lady's married name. Somehow I had overlooked a census record from 1910 that showed my grandfather had a brother. A brother, who I was surprised to learn, was a veteran of World War I. This is a discovery only hours old; found as I was preparing this blog. So far I know that Coleman was born on March 5, 1887, three years before my grandfather. He moved away to Chicago, had a family, and outlived my grandfather by 24 years before dying in Ravenden Springs, Arkansas in 1977. In 1930 Coleman had three children, Fred, born 1913; Lillian, born 1916; and Edith, born in 1921. All gone I suppose, but it might be fun to see where that branch of the family has gotten to.

American mobility makes it easy to lose relatives. Even on the McKean side of the family which arrived in 1718 and stayed in New Hampshire and Massachusetts until World War II, we lost track of a sister of my grandfather. It's a measure of our computer society that that branch of the family was reunited online in the last two years. In some cases computers can act as a time machine and bring us back into our past while bringing us closer in the present.