The Good Old Days?
I’ve been doing some genealogy searches lately into the family of my paternal grandfather. No one ever talked about his family, and we never saw any of his siblings, so it was a bit of a mystery.
I now think I know why – they were all dead.
My grandfather died when he was 67, younger than I now am, but he was the only member of his generation that made it 60. His father died when he was 74 and his mother was 68, so it was weird that his sister and two brothers died so young. In 1950 he was the only one left.
I looked at their occupations and think I found the reason. My grandfather was the only one who didn’t work in the local woolen mills. His sister and brothers all worked in the mills, and not the water powered mills that their father worked in initially, but the later coal-fired, steam mills. Like all mill workers of the time, they lived within walking distance of the mills. They started working early, around 12 years old, because you had to pay to go to high school, public school was only elementary school at the time.
My grandfather left the mills behind and served in the Army, then the State Troopers. He paid to go to high school, and had some college courses before he settled in as a farmer. He lived in a healthier environment, far removed from the dust and fumes of a coal-fired steam woolen mill.
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The family graveyard where my father is buried has lots of gravestones in front of tiny graves that read only, “Baby LastName”. They didn’t name children at birth then, because so many died before they reached three months old. The pile of tiny gravestones didn’t start receding until after the invention of sulfa drugs in the 1930’s…
Ruth Dumka, October – November 1900, my grandfather’s youngest sibling. The 1900 Census asked how many children a woman had and how many lived which was 5 and 4 for my great grandmother Dumka and Iknow it was 6 and 5 for my grandmother Dumka.