‘He kindly stopped for me’

Here’s one aspect of genealogy I don’t see acknowledged very often: its preoccupation with death. In the years before detailed vital records, most folks were largely invisible to the historical record. They didn’t show up in the newspaper until the end had arrived, and sometimes only if their last moments proved remarkable. This has certainly been the case in my own family. Take, for instance, thirteen-year-old Arthur Collison, whose mother, Ann Wolfe, immigrated from Ireland in 1849. He met his maker on a Sunday morning in Carroll, Iowa, when he was run over by a wagon. That was in 1903. Six years later, Maurice Wolfe, along with his entire family, was killed when a hurricane struck the gulf coast of Texas and Louisiana. He had been in a boat when the tidal wave came crashing down, while Mrs. Wolfe and their six children had been at the house, presumably in a safer haven. Rescuers found their bodies days later, three miles away.

Another Maurice Wolfe, living in Lost Nation, Iowa, in 1927, left a note for his wife on the kitchen table and then disappeared:

Dear Gertie, I am doing this for the good of both of us. I am going to shoot myself. If there is a God, I hope he is not too hard on me. I still love you, Gertie.

Some people thought it might have been a trick, that Old Maurice just needed to get away for a bit. Gertie moved to California, and it took three months for some high school boys to stumble over his corpse.

Oxford Mirror, 18 August 1927, page 1; Davenport Democrat Leader, 12 August 1927, page 16

Then there’s the death of Daniel F. Wolfe, up in the wild and dangerous hills of South Dakota. It could have come straight out of a dime novel—indeed, I wrote my own version of it here.

Over the years I have cultivated a scholarly distance from these sorts of stories. (And there are so, so many.) I find them “interesting,” a break from the many lives that otherwise hold tight to their secrets. That’s my family, though. Nowadays, I research other people’s stories, and my attitude has begun to shift.

During the holidays, I worked on several family narratives, and difficult deaths turned up again and again. I found myself audibly wincing when a death certificate unexpectedly turned violent:

This wasn’t “interesting.” It was horrifying. So was the death certificate that described a “throat cut by falling through window of building.” Or a “Gun Shot wound into heart.” Or the newspaper squib that reported how a car ran over the body of somebody’s relative “and rolled her for a distance of about twenty feet before it could be stopped.” Another short article noted that someone’s great-grandfather, “a miner, fell from the surface of the ninth level in the Champion mine, a distance of 500 feet, recently and was gathered up a shapeless mass.”

I’ve begun to find these stories genuinely upsetting, and that’s just me. What about the clients for whom I uncovered these stories? One cried when she read about her relative’s death. Another asked I soften the edges a bit lest her elderly father, for whom the narrative was a gift, might be too rattled. Death lands differently on different people. For one client, a violent death actually served as the point of departure, the moment where a search for meaning began—and ended.

There’s no right way to handle this, and the only wrong way is to lie. We’re all different. But it’s often an awkward negotiation between genealogist and client—how best to be honest in the face of death.

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Image at top: from the silent film The Phantom Carriage (1921)