Thanks. My parents often talked about that flu. They themselves were just babies or not yet born at the time, but their respective parents lost relatives and friends to that epidemic.
I didn't think we could have such an epidemic today, what with all the antibiotics and other treatments developed since the 1918 flu, but I was wrong. This strain was more deadly and less responsive to treatment than any I've seen in my lifetime. Of course, having the wrong vaccine isn't helping. I suppose we are going to have tougher, more aggressive strains that won't respond to our current treatments.
My father was born in Norway in 1921. It wasn’t until he was an adult that he learned that he had an older sister who died when she was just a toddler in 1919, presumably from the flu. His mother never spoke of her. It was as if, if she didn’t talk about it, it didn’t happen. My father also didn’t learn until he was in his teens’ that his father, was actually his step father and that his actual father died in an accident only a week before he was born. As I understand, early childhood deaths were common but also so painful that it was often kept a secret or not discussed. After my grandmother died, my father found among her belongings, the one and only picture of his sister and I have it now, she was a beautiful child. ; (
When my mother died, we went to bury her in the family cemetery plot set aside for her, but when the grave was dug, they found the coffin of a young child and after researching the cemetery records it was that of a two-year-old child who died in 1919 named Martha. But no one in my family ever knew of or heard of or anything about this child. My brother tried to research the death records in the Harrisburg PA courthouse from this period but there had been a fire in the court house in the 1930’s and many if not most records from that time period and before were destroyed.
We to this day do not know who Martha was. Was she the illegitimate child of some relative, perhaps my grandfather’s brother who was a bit of a rogue and a gambler and died in his 30’s from alcoholism, or perhaps an illegitimate half-sister as her father also had his similar problems or perhaps the child of some family friend who died during the Spanish influenza epidemic and couldn’t otherwise afford to bury her?
We had my mother buried and then reinterned little Martha over my mother’s grave. I think my mother, knowing how much she loved all children, would have been happy to have this poor little child buried close to her in sort of a loving embrace, no matter who she was.
