Disaster
For 2023, I’m writing responses to the 52 Ancestors in 52 Days prompts provided by Amy Johnson Crow on her ”Generations Café” website and Facebook page.
I always think of a disaster as a sudden catastrophic event. I don’t know of any stories like this in my family history. But I can think of a family line that experienced its share of tragedy, making the series of events a multigenerational disaster. I have never been able to find out the “why” of these events, but there was clearly something disastrous going on.
The disaster begins in the family of my second great-grandparents, John and Matilda Starnater Anthis. John and Matilda met and married in the area of the Illinois/Indiana border in the middle of the 19th century. John was from Wabash County, Illinois, and Matilda was from Knox County, Indiana. They had three children, including my great-grandfather Franklin Anthis, who was their first child. But for reasons I have never been able to identify, both John and Matilda died while their children were young; Matilda died in 1856 and John died in 1857, leaving John’s parents to raise the three children, who were all under the age of 10.
My great-grandfather Franklin survived this childhood trauma, marrying Sarah Nunley in Wabash County in 1874. They had two sons before they pulled up stakes and moved to Texas, along with John’s younger brother Isaac Anthis. When they got to Texas, they had one more child.
But disaster struck again – and again, I haven’t been able to figure out why. Their son Harley died in 1877, and both Sarah and their son Otie died in 1880.
Franklin soon remarried, to Martha Elizabeth Kyle, and they had 11 children before Franklin died in 1899 at the young age of 49. Their last child, born a few months before Franklin died, was my grandmother, Susan Vernon Anthis.
This family experienced a sequence of tragic deaths that left minor children to the care of their grandparents and both widows and widowers responsible for the care of their children. I don’t know when bad luck becomes disaster, but I think this might qualify.
Today we would consider a genetic issue, perhaps??