I know this topic might not sound like it’s related to genealogy, but it assuredly is, in more ways than one. In fact, it’s one way the dead can, collectively, speak to us.

This article is the result of a rabbit hole that I managed to reside in for a week or so. More of a rabbit tunnel, actually, an underground maze. I’m sharing this joy with you because there’s good stuff down there – even if I didn’t find my ancestor! This is relevant for your genealogy too.

I’ve separated this data from the actual information about my ancestors because I wanted to share this process with you. While my ancestors aren’t relevant to you (unless you’re a cousin, in which case, howdy), this process certainly is because you can replicate it.

So, why did I go down the rabbit hole?

Rabbit Hole Entrance

Three things made me really curious.

I was searching for the 1838/1839 estate of my female ancestor, Elizabeth McKee, when my cousin, Carol, discovered a court record where her estate administration was ordered. Of course, I know that administration means there was no executor. An administrator was court appointed to handle her affairs, meaning she had no will.

However, the really big surprise was that the entry directly above hers on the same day was another female, Margaret McKee. I had never heard of Margaret McKee, but she was clearly an adult who was housekeeping, because she had an estate (minus land).

That’s really strange. There was no other McKee family in this area, and trust me, I’m painfully familiar with this family. Yet, here she was. Right with Elizabeth, or I would never have noticed. Virginia’s indexed records, where they exist, are painfully incomplete.

Was this an unknown daughter? If so, what are the chances of them perishing at the same time? Not very good, right?

Right?

Secondly, Elizabeth had a son, William, mentioned in her husband, Andrew McKee’s will written in 1805. However, Andrew did not die until 1814, when his will was probated without being updated. There was one William McKee who lived in a different part of the same county, so savvy genealogists noticed that and connected the dots.

However, there were things that really bothered me about that connection. The more I dug, the more contradictory evidence I unearthed, including the fact that the William McKee living in the southern district of the county was of age and on the tax list by 1803, and the 1810 census shows Andrew McKee’s son, William, still at home. Also, Andrew and Elizabeth weren’t old enough to have a son born 1783ish, and Andrew wasn’t in the county until 1787. Oh, and William McKee was a VERY wealthy merchant with a quarter million dollar estate in 1833, who came from New York City (wife’s family) and also had a home in Lynchburg, VA. Andrew McKee, on the other hand, was a farmer who first appeared on the tax list without so much as a horse to his name, but hey, details.

In actuality, after that 1805 mention of William McKee in Andrew’s will, and his cameo appearance in the 1810 census where he was about 18, we never hear about William again. The only reasonable conclusion I can come to is that he died sometime after the 1810 census and probably before 1814 when he was conspicuously absent at his father’s estate sale. His older and younger brothers were both purchasing, but no William. He would have been about 22 by then.

If the William in the southern part of the county was Andrew’s son William, he would have been mentioned someplace, but he wasn’t. Stone cold silence. He would also have been the oldest son, an adult in 1805 when Andrew wrote his will, yet son James was named as the executor.

Nope, something’s not adding up.

But, what were the chances of a young, healthy, strapping teenage boy dying? William had survived that perilous childhood deathtrap. Most people back then died as children, or women in childbirth, or as old people, right?

Right?

But is this accurate? Do we know that, or assume that?

I had to know.

Elizabeth’s oldest son, James McKee, died in 1855, not long after the Washington County, Virginia death records had begun to be kept in 1853, and he was reported to have been buried in the McKee Cemetery. The external reference looked like that information came from his death record, but those death records aren’t transcribed. Crumb!

I went searching at FamilySearch in those death record books when I decided to compile some death data. Early on, there weren’t death certificates as we know them, only an index-type book of deaths with one line entry for each person.

I really, really need to know what people were dying of back in the day, and their ages at death. Are my suppositions correct, or not?

What could I learn about the life and times of my ancestors, and their children, from 1850s death records, more than 15 years after Elizabeth died?

It turns out – a lot!!

Data

I compiled the first six years of death data in a spreadsheet, meaning cause and age, from Washington County, Virginia, from 1853 through 1858, for a total of 806 death records. (I told you I spent a week in this rabbit hole.)

Click on images to enlarge.

As you can see, there’s a goldmine of data here. But look what’s NOT here – place of burial. In case you are wondering, I never did find out where James McKee is buried.

First, some general comments and observations.

The first few years of death records did not include stillbirths. There appeared to be confusion about whether stillbirths, which were generally called “deadborn” were to be included. I also got the idea that babies who died immediately after birth may have been classified as stillborn, based on a situation where the mother died, and the baby’s death occurred the next day but was recorded as stillborn, with an age of “1 day.” Most of the time, the “age” for stillborn babies was left blank.

A majority of the stillborn babies had not been named which probably means names weren’t selected for any babies until after they were born. The exceptional situation is a stillborn child WITH a name. Some babies up to 15 days old that died had not been named. I’ve run across this before in the census records.

I wonder if that happened because the family was waiting to see if the child was a boy or girl, or if they were waiting to see if the baby lived, or if there was some superstition or custom about naming/not naming a child before it was born.

The oldest unnamed child was a child whose mother was enslaved and was 15 months old. I fully suspect that this child had a name, but the “owner,” noted as such, who reported the death, did not know the child’s name, so the child’s name was unknown, not unnamed.

As most genealogists know, middle names did not come into common use until in the 1800s, often mid/late 1800s in Appalachia, EXCEPT for middle names that were family names. If your ancestor born before 1800ish had a middle name, it was likely a woman’s birth surname – mother or maybe a grandmother. I noticed a couple of people in the death records with a middle initial, but very few.

I recognized a huge number of very familiar names of families also found in Claiborne and Hancock Counties in Tennessee, and Lee and Russell Counties in Virginia.

There were a total of 806 deaths or about 134 deaths per year, which was almost an exact number for each year. The 1850 census showed 14,612 residents, so .9%, or less than 1% of the population died each year. That’s quite low, because at that rate it would take more than 100 years for everyone to die if no one else was born. This causes me to suspect that these early death records weren’t complete. Scanning the deaths once again, I realized that there were almost no deaths reported during the winter months – December through February. The weather would have been bad, and people would not have been going to town on snowy, slick, and cold mountain roads riding horseback or in an open wagon. Additionally, you had to ford the river to get to Abingdon from the northern district, near Friendship, where my ancestors lived. Brrr.

Widener Valley, near Friendship – By RebelAt at English Wikipedia, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45097455

By spring, the earth was green again, and apparently, no one thought about reporting past deaths. Fields needed to be plowed, and the spring livestock babies were being born. Plus, the Holston River was still high, cold and swollen from snow melt-off and spring rains.

So perhaps these death numbers should just be uniformly multiplied by about 1.4. This really doesn’t affect our analysis unless the causes of death changed based on season, and I don’t think much changed based on what I’m seeing.

The 1850s was a relatively normal time. No known epidemics in this area, and there were no artificial outside stressors, like a war going on. Wars not only disrupt economies, but men die, and women carry the additional workload. Fewer children are born, and if the fighting takes place in that location, food supply and much else is disrupted, causing even more deaths. Not to mention the disease that’s rampant in areas associated with war.

During the 30 Years’ War in Germany in the 1600s, some entire areas were depopulated, and the “lucky” locations only lost half of their pre-war population numbers. This means that couples had less than the self-replacement number of 2 children per family that lived. If your ancestors had more than two surviving children, the population was growing.

Because the 1850 census listed individuals, it’s possible to reconstruct families using these death records if the deceased had been born by 1850.

These death records also include both enslaved and free people of color.

The cause of death was blank in 70 records.

I did not round ages up or down to the year. Many months/days weren’t given. If the person was under a year old, I recorded the months or days.

If you were alive then, what do you think was your most likely cause of death during these years?

Most Likely Cause of Death

1. Dysentery – 131 or 16% of the people died of dysentery. Two really unlucky people had dysentery with flux.
2. Flux – 120 or 15% of the people died of flux, also known as “bloody flux.”
3. Fever – 107 or 13% of the people died of fever. Of course, fever could be anything from the flu to sepsis from an infected cut. If you had a fever and died, that’s what you died of, even though the fever was a symptom. It could also have been Scarlet Fever or Typhoid Fever, and “fever” was probably a catchall for all of the above.
4. Consumption – 85 or 10% of the people died of what is now known as Tuberculosis.

There’s really no graceful way to say this, but let’s just say that Flux seemed to be another name for Dysentery, which causes me to wonder why both terms were used. After reading up on the subject (we genealogists do such morbid things,) it appears that Flux always involves blood, and Dysentery may not. If you aren’t queasy, you can read about it, here.

I’ve left those two categories separate, because they may have been caused by different organisms, or the criteria might have been different at that time, but it’s safe to say that about one-third of the people died a miserable death from those two.

Know what the good news is? In the US, people didn’t have to deal with the Plague, aka Black Plague, as European populations did.

Ok, so what else were people dying of?

Cause of Death Breakdown

This chart shows causes of death in alphabetical order, including the youngest and oldest ages of people who died of this ailment. Some were clearly afflictions of the young, and some of older people. For example, cough and croup clearly claimed the young, while consumption was by and large constrained to the older population – probably because incubation time was significant and victims generally didn’t die immediately.

Cause of Death in Highest Category Order

Here we have the same information sorted by the highest category total. Dysentery led the pack, affecting the very young and the very old as well, as did Flux. In fact, the 99-year-old woman was the oldest death recorded during that 6 years. It’s pretty amazing that she managed to avoid all other deaths her entire life, before antibiotics and modern medicine, and even in the end, it wasn’t her heart that gave out.

What Am I Most Likely to Die Of?

At any age, what is your most likely cause of death before the age of modern medicine in Washington County, VA? It’s worth noting that these causes of death are probably very similar across most of the US during this time, except perhaps for eastern seaboard cities with heavy concentrations of people.

Using the chart below, find the age by year you’re searching for in the age column. I recorded the death ages by month and week for babies less than a year old, but in this chart, I’ve combined them into the category of “less than one year.”

The cause of death column is just that. I’ve bolded the most common cause of death for that age group. In some cases, more than one is bolded because blank and unknown aren’t causes of death. In other instances, there are multiple causes of death that are tied.

The third column is the number of deaths for that age by cause of death

The fourth column is the total number of deaths, in red, for that age.

So, age 0 is Deadborn, or Stillborn, which I’ve combined into one category. There were 31 deaths from that cause (remember, the early years did not record stillbirths), and the total deaths for age 0 is 31.

In the age category of <1 year, 22 deaths were blank and had no cause of death, and 17 were unknown, which would mean that it wasn’t recorded or “the baby just died.” Things like SIDS and babies with congenital heart defects would all be in the sudden death category which would have been unknown then. The highest actual cause of death is Dysentery with 12. The total for the age of less than one year is 88.

So let me give you an idea of how to use this chart. Let’s say your ancestor died at about 70 years of age. You have no further information.

What kinds of diseases were causes of death for a 70-year-old?

Scan down to age 70. You will see that several things might have caused that person’s death, in about equal probability. However, if I tell you that her daughter who was about 28 and lived with her, died at about the same time, that might shift your analysis to favoring communicable diseases found in both the categories for age 38 and for age 70. You might have guessed I’m referring to Margaret and Elizabeth McKee.

Fever and dysentery were killing 28-year-old people. Fever is also listed for age 70, as is Consumption. If one had Consumption, and contracted either a fever or dysentery, that combination would certainly be lethal. Here’s what I do know from Elizabeth’s estate settlement – a “girl” was paid to care for her “in her final illness” which did not seem to be quick, based on the amount that the caregiver was paid. So we know Elizabeth did not die quickly and was ill for some time. I’m leaning towards consumption here, maybe complicated by something else that Margaret also had. Or, maybe they both had consumption.

What about William, assuming he died between about 18 and 22? Dysentery, Flux or Consumption. It’s possible that he died of the same thing as Andrew in the spring of 1814. Andrew would have been about 50. Few people died at 50, but since he failed to update his will, he may have died quickly or been too ill to update the will. Dysentery is a prime candidate for both.

Children’s Deaths Under a Year

For those interested, children’s deaths under a year are detailed in the chart below by age.

What Age Category is the Most Likely to Die?

As a person living back in the 1800s, at what age would you have been the most likely to die?

Eliminating records that don’t include ages, we can look at the age category in which people are most likely to take that last ride to the churchyard on the back of the wagon.

I fully expect that if the stillbirths had been recorded during the first part of this comparison, stillbirths would outnumber the rest. So, if you managed to survive birth, then your next big challenge would be to survive the next nine years of your life, as illustrated by the number of deaths for those years, in chronological order.

This data somewhat dispells the idea that most women died in childbirth, although at the ages that a first child would be born, early 20s, deaths are fairly high. Death during or as a direct result of childbirth clearly did happen, but often the mother was recorded as having died of fever. It’s hard to know which came first, the fever or the childbirth. We see evidence of these deaths in the census, and when we find men remarrying, but I don’t think childbirth-related death happened as often as I previously thought.

Unfortunately, “childbirth” was not listed as a cause of death. In later years, after this analysis, I did see a few listed as “childbed fever” which was a form of sepsis. So yes, the mother clearly had a fever, but she would not have had the fever had she not given birth.

Based on these records, we can’t tell how many women actually died in or as a result of childbirth.

How Many People Were Old?

Of course, not all “old” people died during those six years, but several did.

Men could often stop paying tithes and some taxes above the age of 50, although that varied significantly by location and time period.

Certainly, people of age 60 and over were considered “old.” Look how much they had managed to survive! Not to mention their bodies probably ached from decades of backbreaking work plus injuries that may or may not have healed correctly. The youngest person with an “old age” cause of death was 65. We don’t consider that old today.

Still, 65 can be retirement age, so I guess “old” is a matter of perception and circumstances.

It’s interesting to look at each red age category, by year, above 60.

Of course, there are fewer and fewer deaths as age increases significantly because there are fewer and fewer people left to die in that category. Remember that these numbers encompass everyone who died during a 6-year period. Only 9 people in their 90s died in 6 years, or one every eight months, on average.

It hurts my heart that the poor 99-year-old lady didn’t just get to pass away in her sleep or rocking chair, but instead died a miserable death of Flux.

Twenty-two people died in their 80s, or about one person every four months or so.

Forty-eight people died in their 70s, or 8 per year, or about one every six weeks.

There were 42 people needing funeral services in their 60s, so slightly fewer than in their 70s.

By the time people in their 90s were passing away, there probably weren’t many people that old left in the county, but there were clearly lots of people in their 60s, 70s, and even 80s that were living.

What About Families?

I will never forget my first foray into a cemetery by myself when I was about 10 years old. We were visiting my brother who lived in a tiny crossroads farm town in Indiana that extended maybe two blocks in each direction. I was bored with adult talk and was allowed to take a walk. I found a cemetery not too far away, along the Eel River by an old covered bridge, and strolled through the cemetery, just looking around.

I recall noticing that one stone was different – tall, older, and slender – with small engraving on all four sides instead of on the front like the others. I read the inscriptions from the late 1800s and discovered that children with the same last name, clearly siblings, were buried on all four sides and had died within a few days of each other. I was stunned and immediately, even at 10, thought about how horrible it must have been for those parents. I wondered what on earth had happened to those children. I hadn’t even heard of Dystnetery and Flux, words all-too-familiar to our ancestors.

Over time, as genealogists working with census data, we’ve come to accept that children died – but 4, together, a few days apart? My 10-year-old brain thought that maybe their house burned, but that would have meant that they all died at once, so I dismissed that idea.

I’m still struggling with the idea that Elizabeth, who would have been about 70, and Margaret, who would have been about 28, actually died at or very near the same time. What are the chances of that happening? How often did this actually occur in families? That just seems too unusual to be happenstance. Elizabeth and Margaret weren’t vulnerable young children.

Elizabeth was older, 70ish, so her death isn’t surprising, but a 28-year-old woman who was not married, so no childbirth involved, who probably lived in the same house with her mother just happened to have her estate probated the same day as her mother?

Ok, so how common was this? I don’t want to connect non-existent dots, like the other William McKee, but on the other hand, I don’t want to ignore or dismiss the obvious either.

I went back and took another look at these death records, scanning for common surnames on the same page. To be clear, this means I likely missed several.

But, I also found several, and what I found chilled me to the bone.

These children are all siblings, from the same family, unless otherwise noted. Each group died in the same year.

• Two children, aged 6 and 3, died on May 19 and 24 of fever.
• Two children died on the same day in August of fever.
• A couple, both aged 34, died on October 9 and November 1.
• Three children aged 5, 7, and 6 months died on October 25, November 10, and 13 of dysentery.
• Two children aged 11 months, and 3 years died on September 8 and October 8 of fever.
• Two children aged 5 and 2 died of Scarlet Fever, both on August 5^th.
• Three children aged 8, 6, and 3 died of fever on November 2, 6, and 12.
• A mother and 3 children died of fever and scarlet fever on June 1 (2 children), June 2, and 4 (the mother). OMG that poor woman. They were all reported by the children’s father. That poor man. I’m amazed he could function to do anything at all.
• Two children died of cough, aged 6 months and 1 year, 11 months. This poor mother lost both of her babies.
• Two children died of cough on May 15 and 29, ages 1 and 4.
• Mother and child, age 43 and age 8. She died of inflammation of the brain and the child died of Scarlet Fever. The mother died on April 12 and the child on June 5^th. One of this family’s enslaved children, age 6, also died of Scarlet Fever on June 2.
• Three family members, aged 65, 10 months, and 7 years died of Dysentery on September 24, 25, and October 18. A man lost his two children, then his mother, and reported all 3. I’d wager his mother was caring for his children while they were ill.
• A mother and daughter, aged 56 and 17, died on June 18 and 21 of Consumption. The son/brother was the informant of both deaths, which causes me to wonder if the father was already deceased.
• A daughter died in April and her mother in October of Consumption. The husband/father was the informant. I can’t help but wonder if he later died of the same thing too.
• Two children, aged 7 and 9, died of Dysentery in September and October in Glade Springs, not far from my ancestors.
• Two more children died of dysentery at the same time in Rush Creek, ages 10 and 12. Dysentery is caused by contact with fecal matter, but can also be spread by poor hygiene, like not washing hands. Of course, people didn’t know that.
• The Widener family experienced heart-wrenching losses beginning in July when 3 Widener children ages 7, 9, and 12 died of Dysentery. Six more Widener children from a different set of parents, ages 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, and 9 died on September 9, 14, 25, and October 1 in Widener Valley. Then a mother and two more children in the same extended family aged 5, 8, and 45 died on September 27, October 4, and 14 (the mother). There were a couple other Widener family members who died too, all of Dysentery, and were clearly related, but I could not place them with the others. That’s 14 people in total who perished within 4 months or so.
• Four children, 12, 17, 19, and 21, died of Dysentery. They lived on the Middle Fork of the Holston, very close to my ancestors. One died on August 17 and three on the 18^th. Good Heavens – three on the same say. Those poor parents. I bet the entire family was gravely ill.
• Three children aged 7 months, 3, and 7 died of Dysentery on August 21, 26, and September 15.
• 4 family members, ages 65, 66, 25, and 40, died. The son reported his parents, then his wife, then he died of Dysentery too.
• Three children, aged 17, 15, and 2 months died of Scrofula on August 28, September (date not given), and November 25^th. The mother reported all 3.
• John Larimer’s 2 children, Hetty and Sarah, aged 6 and 3, died August 6 and 12, 1854, both of Dysentery. The parents were John and Sarah Larimer, and he reported the deaths of both. These are probably my ancestor, Elizabeth Mckee’s great-grandchildren.
• Two children aged 3 and 6 died of Dysentery on August 21 and September 13.
• Three children aged 7, 9, and 11 died of Dysentery on September 20, October 13, and 27.
• Two children aged 7 and 9 died on August 7 and 12 of Dysentery.
• Two children aged 4 and 8 died of the Flux in August and October
• Two children aged 24 and 14 died of the Flux on August 24 and 27 and were reported by their mother.
• Three children aged 2, 4, and 18 died of Flux in September, reported by their mother. Was the father ill himself, or perhaps already deceased?
• A man lost his mother, brother, child, and wife, ages 81, 60, and 35. The older people had Flux (August – October), the wife had fever, and the child was stillborn in July.
• Children ages 7 and 13 died of fever in June and December.
• A mother died of hemorrhage of the lungs on July 12, and her 12-day-old child died 3 days later with no cause of death listed.
• A baby was stillborn in March, and their older child, age 3, died of Flux in October.
• A person lost their mother, age 56, then their 2-year-old child to Flux on May 21 and 24. I bet they were buried side by side.
• A couple lost 2 children, age 4 and the other age not stated, both on October 19, of Consumption. This makes me wonder if the cause of death was actually something else, but that mattered little to the grieving parents.
• Three children, ages 1, 4, and 8 were lost to Flux in June, July and September.
• Two children aged 1 and 5 died of Flux on June 3 and 20.
• Many Fleenor extended family members died of Flux, beginning with one man and three children, aged 1, 3, and 6. Then his mother or grandmother died, age 79. An enslaved person owned by the family, age 33 and her child, age 3 died too. Another Fleenor man along with 6 children aged 2, 3, 7, 9, and 11, plus one that was stillborn. Also, the family matriarch, age 89 plus an additional enslaved person, age 4, beginning with the enslaved child in March. Most of the rest were in June through August of 1858. It sounds like the entire plantation had Flux, resulting in 16 deaths, and that’s assuming I found them all. Married daughters would not have had the Fleenor surname.
• Two children died, one 18-month-old died in August of liver complaint, whatever that was, and one was stillborn in October.
• Two of Robert Larimore’s children, ages 3 and 8, died of Scarlet Fever in March and December of 1858. They were possibly my ancestor Elizabeth McKee’s great-grandchildren.
• A 35-year-old woman died, and her child was stillborn. She died of Consumption on October 24, and the baby died on 25th, although I don’t know how the baby was stillborn the day after she died. I can’t imagine being pregnant while fighting for one’s breath with Tuberculosis.
• Two children aged 12 and 8 died of Scarlet Fever on March 8 and 15.

I don’t know anyone personally, before Covid, other than a car accident, that lost multiple family members at the same time.

Wow, so much grief. I think I just need to sit a minute.

Bonus – Relationships, Occupations, and Locations

There’s more too. The informant is listed and their relationship to the deceased. This can help sort out other relationships as well.

Birthplaces aren’t just useful for the people listed but can show significant migration paths for the residents of this county and community.

Unfortunately, some years simply had the place of birth listed as Washington County with ditto marks for everyone, which clearly is not accurate, so those years simply have to be ignored, unfortunately. However, if you don’t look at what’s “normal” for other years, you won’t realize that the year you are viewing is not accurate.

The most informative places of birth are the locations for the oldest people because they reach back the furthest in time. If you can reconstruct their family, and find your ancestor somehow tied to theirs, that may provide a HUGE clue for you. One of the most difficult tasks for genealogists is figuring out where someone came from.

Tax, estate, land, and court records are wonderful for constructing and fleshing out lists of people found with your ancestors. People often moved and migrated in groups – not only for safety during the journey but to have resources and help once arriving. Plus, people talked about “amazing opportunities” in the places they gathered – at church, on farms, and in town.

Birth Places found:

• Albemarle VA
• Botetourt, VA (2)
• Ashe Co., NC
• Bartley Co, PA
• Bedford Co., NC
• Buckingham Co., VA
• Craven Co., NC (2)
• Greene Co, Illinois
• Hagerstown, PA
• Lee Co., VA – a student of Emory and Henry College (who knew there was a college in this county in the 1850s)
• Massachusetts
• Nashville, TN
• NC (3)
• Orange Co., NC
• Pulaski Co., KY (2) student of Emory and Henry College
• Scotland
• Sevier Co., NC
• Smyth Co., VA (7)
• Stokes Co., NC (2)
• Surry Co., NC
• Wilkes Co., NC
• Wythe Co., VA

The death location can be very specific, blank, just the county name, or even something unexpected like “poor house.” I was surprised to see some death locations in other counties. I wonder if the death was simply recorded, or if the body was brought back for burial.

Enslaved People

For researchers searching for enslaved people, death records began in the early 1850s, more than a decade before the Civil War, and provide context for where your ancestor was found and with whom. Their death location is often the name or location of a plantation, and even if not, the owner’s name can be tracked through land and tax records. Even if your ancestors died in earlier generations, or after the Civil War, finding that thread to pull is invaluable. Tracking the enslaving family back to where they came from likely informs you of where your ancestors probably came from too, given that wealthy families often brought enslaved people along with them to the frontier.

I suspect that not all deaths of enslaved people were recorded.

Correlating death records with tax records reaching back in time can be very enlightening. Free people of color are recorded on tax records as well. Lucky for us, The tax collector wasn’t going to miss any revenue!

Medical Treatment

What was medical treatment like prior to the 1900s?

Most people treated themselves, or a local midwife also dispensed accumulated knowledge of herbs and remedies that addressed the symptoms of the patient.

There were doctors in Washington County, but clearly, without knowledge of modern medicine, and without many tools, there often wasn’t a lot they could do. Bleeding as a treatment was falling out of favor but continued at some level until the late 1800s, and often made a bad situation worse. In situations where the body was severely weakened and dehydrated, like with Dysentery and Flux, the loss of blood would just be one more thing for a beleaguered body to fight.

Doctors couldn’t even help themselves. A doctor, age 33, died of fever and so did the doctor that was 81. A third physician, age 29, died of inflammation. I just want to scream, across the years, stop bleeding people and ANTIBIOTICS!!!! Of course, antibiotics didn’t come into play until the 1900s, so doctors simply did the best they could.

What Did I Learn?

I never did find what I was seeking, the location where James McKee or his sister who both died in 1855, were buried.

However, I discovered a HUGE trove of information about what was happening in Washington County, VA, which can probably be extrapolated for that region and perhaps further afield. Regardless, it gives you a pattern to follow for your ancestors where they lived.

I have a much better appreciation for how frightened mothers and couples must have been for their young children. Fear must have clutched everyone’s heart if someone had intestinal issues, or coughed. Reminds me of how we’ve all felt about Covid over the past couple of years. Close contact, such as church and funerals, probably spread their diseases the same way Covid is spread today. Covid also gave us a much better, and unfortunate, appreciation for mass and unexpected deaths. So many families have lost multiple members.

The only testament we often have today about deaths during that timeframe is a “space” of 3 or 4 years between children who actually made it to a census. The larger the space, the more children that died. Most of them never had tombstones that survived, just sad wooden crosses nailed together. The parents, and grandparents, if they were living, knew where they were buried. No one else would care, and a generation later, no one knew they had ever existed unless a person who was then old thought to mention their sister or brother who had died decades before.

I also suspect that while no one ever got used to children perishing, that at some level, couples expected some children to die. It was part of the natural life cycle – as painful as that was. Even royalty who had the best care available at the time referred to “an heir and a spare.”

Religion played a large part in their lives and these pioneers would have derived comfort from their religious beliefs and the pastor’s words at the funerals.

In many cases, the mother was either pregnant again, or they were busy doing chores that could not wait for grief to abate. Animals had to be fed, milked, and slaughtered – or no one else would eat either. Fields had to be plowed, and cotton, flax, and wool had to be spun. Grain had to be ground. Food had to be cooked every day. Time to grieve was a luxury no one could afford.

When I was young, I remember the older women whose birth probably reach back into the early 1900s making seemingly insensitive comments when a child was stillborn, died, or a miscarriage occurred. “Just try again” was what they said. That’s probably EXACTLY what had been said to them under the same circumstances. Now, I view that more as a defense mechanism and “legacy advice,” probably passed down for generations, than simply being hard-hearted.

Sadly, it seems that almost every family experienced multiple deaths of their children, and many people married at least twice, if not three times. Not because of divorce, but due to death. Now we know their causes of death.

Funerals were probably as common as the Sunday sermon. If 134 people died in a year (plus the ones that weren’t recorded,) that’s at least 2.5 deaths a week. I know there were two Presbyterian Churches during this timeframe, plus probably a Baptist and Methodist church. It would be safe to say that each preacher probably performed at least one funeral each week.

Everyone knew how to build a coffin. In fact, maybe a few were built ahead and stored in someone’s barn – especially child-sized, as sad as that was.

Years later, in Claiborne County, family history reveals that the community experienced what was reported as a smallpox outbreak. Many people died. Two of Ruthy Dodson Estes’s adult daughters in their 40s died two days apart in April of 1888, plus both of one daughter’s children. Ruthy’s husband had gone to Texas, permanently, so her son, Lazarus Estes, built his sisters’ coffins, dug their graves, and buried them, just like he had for his own two daughters four years earlier.

There weren’t enough people available to build coffins or dig graves in the community. No one wanted to handle the dead bodies, not only because of contagion, but because so many people were sick themselves. As awful as that time period was, there is little history remaining of that smallpox outbreak today, and we wouldn’t have known about it at all had the story not been repeated by Lazarus to his son, who told his son, Uncle George, who was born in the 19-teens, who repeated it to me in the 1980s.

I wonder if the Fleenor and Widener families, both of whom experienced a devastating number of deaths in Washington County, carry any oral history of that mass-death event? I suspect that people were discouraged from dwelling on the “past” and were encouraged to focus on the here-and-now. After all, nothing could be done about that, and one really did have to get on with life.

Viewing death records through the lens of local history is quite enlightening too. Where would these people have been buried? Was there a family cemetery on their land or did their religious denomination have a church graveyard?  Can you figure out who attended what denomination of church? If so, what is the relevant church history? Where did the family live? Dysentery was related to contaminated water. Did the family have a spring with their own headwater, or were they sharing a water source? Did they have a well that got contaminated?

Of course, these answers won’t be available in death records, but land and tax records may help to resolve these questions and illuminate the information forthcoming about the county and neighborhood where your ancestors lived – and even whose funerals they attended. Just discovering the name of the local preacher may help, because sometimes people settled with their minister when he was called to an area.

We often think of death records as the end of the line, but they have so much more to offer and can lead the way to the information you need!

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