Public Health and Private Lives
Online articles about the 1918 “Spanish Flu” epidemic written before 2020 identify it as “the most severe pandemic in recent history.” (We now know that’s not true.) For a lot of reasons, the 1918 epidemic has faded from our memories. The people who experienced this epidemic are no longer alive and our history since then has been full of events that take our attention away from it. However, I have found information about the impact of this epidemic on my own family history, and I want to tell you about it.
Edward Henry Arnold (1889-1918)
My paternal granduncle, Edward Henry Arnold died in this influenza outbreak on December 3, 1918. Here’s how the local newspaper reported his death:
This story tells me a lot about this situation. Both he and his wife were ill; she lived but he died. They had a small child. One of his brothers was in France, serving in World War I.
This family photo is the only picture I have of Edward:
Edward was the 8th child born to Warner and Angelina Wilcox Arnold in Hancock County, Illinois. This was not a wealthy family; Warner’s father, Miles Arnold, was a disabled Civil War veteran who had moved his family from Ohio to Illinois, then back to Ohio, and then to Kansas before settling permanently in Hancock County by 1880. Warner was identified as a farm laborer in the 1870 census, as a farmer on land he rented in the 1900 census, and as a laborer on a dairy farm in the 1910 census. By 1920, Warner was an itinerant laborer, and in 1930 he was the caretaker of a cemetery.
Edward married Bessie Pearl Edgecomb in Carthage, Illinois (the county seat of Hancock County) in 1914. Bessie had also grown up in Hancock County; her father, Morgan Edgecomb, is identified on several census records as a day laborer, farm laborer, and “odd jobs” worker.
Edward and Bessie had their first child, Lowell Edward Arnold, in December of 1917. But as the information above tells us, Edward died of influenza before Lowell was a year old.
The newspaper article announcing his death noted that his brother, Warner Joseph (apparently called “Joseph” in the family, although records always identify him as “Warner J.” or “Warner Joseph”), was “in France” at the time. A little research revealed that Joseph was among a group of 125 young men from Hancock County who had been drafted for military service in April of 2018. Just a couple of months before Edward’s illness and death, another newspaper article noted that “the boys” – including Joseph – were on their way back to the east coast from their training base in California and would be passing through Ft. Madison, Iowa, just a few miles from Hancock County. The article listed the residents of the county who caravanned to Ft. Madison to greet the boys on their way to their deployment to France. Edward Arnold was one of the people who made this trip. He died three months later.
Bessie never seemed to recovered from Edward’s death. The 1920 census show Bessie and her toddler son Lowell living with Bessie’s parents (Morgan and Nancy Edgecomb) and her older brother Fred in Carthage, the county seat of Hancock County. Morgan died late in 1920, and the 1930 census shows that Bessie and Lowell were still living with Nancy and Bessie’s two older brothers – Fred and James – in Carthage. The 1940 census shows that the situation had not changed.
Things changed a lot shortly after 1940, however, when Lowell registered for the draft. Nancy died in 1941, but Bessie continued to live with James; Fred had moved to Oklahoma after Nancy’s death and he died there later in 1941. I don’t know the details of Lowell’s service, but he died at Anzio in Italy in 1944. His body was returned to the United States and he was buried at the National Cemetery in Quincy, Illinois.
Here's Lowell:
Bessie lived until 1972 and never remarried. I found a 1967 newspaper article that reported “Strong-Arm Robbers Take $600 in Cash” from “elderly Carthage widow.” The elderly widow was Bessie, and the newspaper reported her age as 77. The article indicated that she lived alone and that one of the robbers had lured her outside by saying that he had seen a kitten with a broken leg in front of her house. The article noted that Bessie “takes in stray cats,” and when she opened the door two men came in, held a knife to her neck, and demanded money.
Edward had died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, but the shadow of his death lingered around this family for decades.
Wesley Harrison Workman (1888-1918)
My maternal granduncle Wesley Harrison Workman died in the influenza outbreak in El Campo, Texas, in October of 1918. I can’t find any newspaper story about his death; this part of Texas was not as well developed as Hancock County, Illinois, in the early decades of the 20th century.
Wesley had been born in Nebraska in 1888 to Thomas and Mary Workman; Tom’s first wife, Etta, had died the previous year, and Tom had married Mary Elizabeth Thomas, his distant cousin-by-marriage, a few months later. Tom and Mary participated in the Oklahoma Land run in 1889, settling on their land claim in Logan County, Oklahoma, with Wesley and Tom’s two children from his first marriage, James and Gemima.
Tom and Mary had seven more children in Oklahoma, including my grandfather, Thomas Calvin Workman, Jr. Wesley married Susan Jane Blessing in Logan County in 1910; the census that year identified Wesley as a farm laborer.
Here’s Wesley:
Wesley and Susan had one child, a daughter named Emma, in 1911. I don’t know much about the life Wesley and Emma lived over the next few years, but I do know that they were living in El Campo, Texas, by 1918. Wesley’s parents and several of his siblings had moved to Texas in 1915; Wesley’s 1918 draft registration shows him living in El Campo, and his death certificate shows the same residence.
I know a little about the life of the family that continued to live in the shadow of Wesley’s death. For one thing, Wesley’s younger brother, my grandfather Thomas C. Workman, Jr., was also very ill with influenza. Family lore says that he was in a coma at one point, and his lungs were weak for the rest of his life. The lung weakness is the main reason the family moved from southeast Texas to Arizona in 1931; his doctor had told him that his lungs would never recover in the humid climate of southeast Texas. If he had not moved his family to Arizona, my mother (who was born in 1921) would never have met and married my father.
There were other direct effects as well. The 1920 census shows Wesley’s widow Susan (Susie) and her daughter Emma were living with Wesley’s parents (my great-grandparents) in El Campo.
There is more to the story (there’s always more to the story). As this record shows, Susie Workman married Charley Workman in December 1920.
The 1920 census record we’ve already looked at shows that a son named Charles was living with his parents, Tom and Mary, in 1920. Susie and Emma were sharing the house at the time; Charley married Susie, his brother’s widow, that same year.
Susie and Charley had one daughter, Velma, in 1926. But again, there’s more to the story. In 2018, I discovered a link to Velma Adele Workman through an Ancestry DNA match, and she set me straight on all of these family relationships. She was my mother’s first cousin and had fond memories of growing up around her extended family, including my grandparents and my mother. Velma went to Sul Ross University in the Big Bend area of Texas (for those of you who are curious, like me, “Sul Ross” was named for Lawrence Sullivan Ross, governor of Texas from 1897-1891 and president of Texas A&M from 1891-1898). Velma became a teacher before she married Kenneth Poenisch in 1947. They had eight children before Kenneth died in 2011. I was able to introduce Velma to my Aunt Mary (her cousin) and to my 2nd cousins in Oklahoma before Velma died in 2020.
Here's Velma.
These are two out of millions of stories of families that were impacted irreparably and permanently by the 1918 pandemic. I haven’t uncovered other stories in my immediate family, but there are probably more. We don’t yet know the stories of families that have been impacted by the current COVIC-19 pandemic. But if the past is any guide to the future, the legacy will be long-lasting.