In mid-July, my sister in Houston was impacted by Hurricane Beryl. She lost electricity and air conditioning for more than a week. Have you encountered any stories of natural disasters that affected one of your ancestors? Hurricanes and tornados must have been terrifying when they appeared without warning on the horizon. Were your ancestors near Chicago from October 8-10, 1871? The fire killed approximately 300 people and left more than 100,000 residents homeless.
Did you have family in San Francisco on April 18, 1906 when an earthquake and resulting fire disrupted life from southern Oregon to Los Angeles?
How about the tornado that struck LeMars, Iowa, on June 17, 1885 causing great loss of life in Plymouth and Cherokee Counties in the state? Names of the dead were printed in the newspaper.
Newspapers are a great source of news after the event. Checking on a death date for an ancestor may lead you to surprising circumstances. People died by suffocation during the worst of the Dust Bowl storms. Riverboats exploded, drowning hundreds. Railroad accidents resulted in mass tragedies.
Did you see the story in the newspaper and then move on? Or did you consider the consequences to the family? Did they lose the breadwinner of the family? Did they move away to try to avoid the next disaster? Or did they just rebuild in the same place?
These are the headlines in the lives of our ancestors. What happened? Who was affected? How did they cope with the results? It is your job to capture the information about the event and preserve it in a page of storytelling. The
story might lead you into asking questions about weather forecasting or railroad fatalities in that historical period. Research about local disasters may help you understand how your ancestor faced the challenges in his life.
Carol Cooke Darrow teaches a free Beginning Genealogy class on the second Saturday of the month. Register at cogensoc.us.