“Remoted” – Day 435 (Tuesday)

Many mornings before work, I sit in the living room with the laptop. Morning laptop time includes personal email, social accounts, and sometimes, ancestry research. Evening living room laptop time is for writing.

This morning there was a trip into ancestry.com. There was a records hint for my paternal great-grandfather. It was the “Deaths Registered in the City of Fitchburg in the Year Nineteen Hundred.” The page displayed contains records number 247 through 267. Record 253 is the one for my ancestor, the record for the death of  (no name) Simonds on June 21 at age 15 days young. The cause of death was Infantile Debility – Premature Birth. This made me sad. Other records show the baby had a name and it was Doris Emogene, sister to my not yet born grandfather and his twin.

Baby Simonds was not the only infant on that page of the Deaths Registered in Fitchburg list. Of the 20 records on the page, seven are infants under one month old. The deaths of six other children aged six months to 16 years are listed.  Twenty records on the page and 13 are children. So much sadness on one page.

Part of a page full of sadness

That same year, on the maternal side of the family, my great grandparents had a loss three months later. Recorded in the same beautiful script on the page with records 425 through 445 is record 428, the death of John W. Nakyva. He was born January 23, 1900 and died on September 29 of the same year. Ten of the deaths recorded on that page are of children younger than one year. Also on the page are children between the ages of one year and five years, and another aged 10. That’s another page with 13 children out of 20 records. That is even sadder.

Pretty script, sad records.

Two pages probably do not constitute a scientific sample, but the percentage of child deaths on those two pages is horrifying at 26 children out of 40 recorded deaths. The year 1900 in Fitchburg seems to have been a tragic year for infants and children. So much heartache for so many families.