Read a most interesting article in the November Smithsonian Magazine all about the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918. The author, John M. Barry, has spent years researching this topic and now believes this pandemic started in southwest Kansas, Haskell County to be exact, in January 1918. Several Haskell County men who’d been exposed went to Camp Funston in central Kansas and within two weeks, 1100 soldiers at this huge Army training camp were admitted to the hospital. Then, likely carrying the disease, infected men were shipped overseas…… to France and then Spain, where it spread among all soldiers like wildfire. In the end, this disease killed between 50 and 100 million people before running its course. Some 670,000 died in the U.S. (And to die from this influenza was a horrible death. If you dare, Google a picture of a lung from a deceased influenza victim.)
Think about your male ancestors, aged 17-45, in 1917. Were they in a place and situation that they might have become infected? (You’re here; they didn’t die, eh?) And what about your ancestor’s family? My grandfather had enlisted in Michigan in late 1917 and was at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center (north of Chicago) and the war was over before he finished his training. How lucky he was, and I am, that he survived.
My paternal Grandmother died of the illness when my father was age 9.
I’ve always been so disappointed and sad that my mother had only one true cousin because her only aunt died in the flu epidemic… in Indiana.
My Dad was born in Morris, OK on April 6, 1917. Seems odd that children born that year would have survived.
My maternal grandfather’s older brother completed his WW1 Draft Card in June of 1918 in Fulton County, AR. He was 21. In October of 1918 he died of the flu epidemic at Camp Pike Army Base in Pulaski Cnty (Little Rock) AR.