Exploring History Through Genealogy

How Did The Spanish Flu Affect My Family

With the emergence of a pandemic in my lifetime, I as a genealogist wondered how the previous pandemic, the Spanish flu, influenced the ancestors in all my research. I began by doing a search of my database, which contained the lines of my husband as well as my sister-in-law and had a total of 13, 567 people, and drew up a list of those who had died between 1918 and 1920, the length of time the Spanish flue raged. I came up with a list of 16 people.

Next was to eliminate all those who died before the outbreak in September of 1918. Many of them I only had dates off of their tombstones, so I had a lot of fun looking for records of their death and verifying that it was indeed them! Amazingly enough, the four who died in 1918 all died in either January or February long before the flu first appeared and far away from Kansas where it first originated as they were all in Ohio. This left me with 12 ancestors to look at.

My next step was to continue to get exact death dates for each person. I looked through Ancestry.com first, and then turned to familysearch.org to find death certificates where possible.

When I couldn't find death certificates, I went to the newspapers to try to find an obituary and discover the cause of their deaths. In 1919, they were not yet publishing obituaries regularly. There are three websites I looked at to achieve this, www.newspapers.com, www.newspaperarchive.con and www.genealogybank.com. I tend to have more luck with the first and second. This time, however, I only found 2 obituaries from the 12 people I researched and only one alluded to a cause of death.

For those whose cause of death alluded me, I then turned to the history of the area they lived in to find how the Spanish Flu impacted their region. One of the areas I looked at was Ohio. Although the main deaths occurred in Camp Sherman, Chillicothe and Dayton, deaths continued into January of 1919 (https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Influenza_Epidemic_of_1918). In fact, according to local newspapers to the area I research, Seneca and Sandusky Counties, their were cases into late 1919 and a run of the regular flu in early 1920. Another factor to assessing to probability of the flu being the cause of death, is that the Spanish flu mainly attacked young, healthy people, about 20 to 40 years old.

Of the 16 people who died in 1919 and 1920, only one says absolutely that she died of Pneumonia caused by influenza. Another two died of pneumonia but had chronic conditions prior so it is possible that they were more susceptible to the flu. Another woman was found dead by the physician and the cause of death is unknown. She seems to have lived on her own so there was no one to confirm if she ailed of the flu before her death. Another further four women I ruled out either because of their cause of death or the fact that they are beyond the age range that was typically struck by the flu. The remaining four people I could not find any hint of their deaths, however three of them were about the right age to have contracted it. Interestingly enough, all of those who died in these two years were women except for one. I think that my family got off very lucky when it came to the loss they suffered. I believe the cause for this is that my family were mainly rural farmers, so likely didn't have a lot of contact with those infected by the flu. While the flu affected every part of the globe, the highest death rates were among the cities and larger congregations of people, such as the military and labor camps.