Friday Fotos (October 25, 2013) -- Abby Greene Aldrich of Providence, Rhode, Island

Abby Greene Aldrich, age 6.

Abby Greene Aldrich circa 1890.

Abby Greens Aldrich as a debutante in October 1893

Abby and her husband John D. Rockefeller, Jr. in 1911

See item #1 in tomorrow's Saturday Serendipity for why Friday Fotos is devoted to Abby Greene Aldrich.

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All photos from the blog author's copy of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family (New York, New York: Random House 1993) by Bernice Kert.

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Genealogy, Genealogists, Science & Healthcare . . . Oh My! (October 24, 2013)

Typhoid Death Rates 1890, 1906 and 1918.  [Cartoon by Zim, 1919]

Amid all the current controversy swirling around healthcare availability, coverage, and affordability in the U.S. -- and the political debate that can often can come down to views about whether or not basic, continuous healthcare is a right or a privilege -- what perspective, if any, can genealogists bring to the table?

Those of us who have delved into our family histories here in the U.S. very quickly come to the realization that our ancestors lived in very different worlds than we do; but it is not until we stumble across the very common instances of childhood deaths and disabilities in our family histories that we come face-to-face with the shocking realization that living beyond childhood was not something to be taken for granted by our ancestors -- and I'm not talking about ancestors in the time of the Great Migration or earlier.  

A few examples will serve to starkly illustrate what I mean . . .

This week Laura Mattingly of The Old Trunk in the Attic posted about the family of her great grandfather's brother, William B. Mann.  William was married twice, but he and his first wife, Nancy Clemie, had 11 children together before she died at age 55 in 1894.  Of the 11 children Nancy and William had together, five of them (born between roughly 1864 and 1870) died in infancy or childhood. The exact causes of death are not stated, but almost certainly included one or more infectious diseases.

Abby Greene Aldrich was born on October 26, 1874 in Providence, Rhode Island.  She was one of the 11 children of Abby Pearce Chapman and Nelson W. Aldrich, the future powerful U.S. Senator from Rhode Island.  Abby Greene Aldrich grew up in a privileged and affluent home.  She later married John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and together they had six children born between 1903 and 1915.  Of the 11 children born to Abby Greene's parents between 1867 and 1888, three of them died before age four.  In addition, two of the surviving children were seriously disabled by infectious diseases. One became completely deaf and the other was hearing impaired -- both for the rest of their lives. 

My maternal grandmother was born in 1897.  She was the fourth of the six children of Walter W. Cooke and his wife Leonette Flagg who were all born between 1892 and 1902.  My grandmother was one of only three children to survive beyond age six.

My paternal grandfather was born in 1896 and was one of the five children of John Andrew Tew and his wife Margaret Conner who were all born between 1885 and 1901.  Only my grandfather and his older sister survived beyond age two.  

Reliable childhood mortality statistics did not begin in the U.S. until roughly the turn of the last century.  Before 1900, death rate data was crude and so rates have been estimated from decennial census figures.  Using census estimates and then later mortality data, it has been estimated that the overall death rate in the 1850s in the U.S. was about 22 per 1,000 persons.  By 1900 the rate had fallen to about 18 per 1,000 and by 1940 the rate stood at 11 per 1,000 -- half what is was 90 years earlier.  

In 2003, the mortality rate in the U.S. for children under age five was 8 per 1,000 live births, but this still placed the U.S. higher in child mortality rates than the UK and Canada (6 per 1,000), Germany (5 per 1,000), Spain (4 per 1,000), Norway (4 per 1,000), Sweden (3 per 1,000) and France, Iceland, Portugal, Italy, Australia, Japan, Austria, and many other countries including Croatia!

Hard as it is for us to understand today, the predominant belief about the cause of infectious diseases prior to the 1870s was the "miasma theory."  This medical belief was that disease was caused by poisonous vapors or "miasmas" that were foul and smelled offensive.  It was generally believed  that a variety of illnesses were caused by the poisons in these noxious vapors being inhaled.  Before the 1870s and the development of theories about the biological bases for infections, resources were squandered on disease prevention approaches involving ventilation systems and ineffective quarantine programs.  And once bacteriologic science took off after the 1870s understanding of the exact routes of various infectious diseases was still slow to replace miasma theory and other non-scientific explanations for disease and non-accidental causes of death.

Part of the problem for attacking infectious diseases in the United States in the late 19th Century was captured by John M. Barry in his detailed book on the 1918 Flu pandemic, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History.  Barry summarized on p. 32 . . .

               [B]y the 1870s, European medical schools required and gave rigorous scientific
               training and were generally subsidized by the state. In contract, most American
               medical schools were owned by a faculty whose profits and salaries -- even when
               they did not own the school -- were paid by student fees, so the schools often had
               no admission standards other than the ability to pay tuition. No medical school in
               America allowed medical students to routinely either perform autopsies or see
               patients, and medical education often consisted of nothing more than two four-
               month terms of lectures. Few medical schools had any association with a
               university, and fewer still had ties to a hospital. In 1870 even a Harvard medical
               student could fail four of nine courses and sill get an M.D.  

The advent of a science-based approach to medicine had dramatic results as measured by dropping death rates and increasing life expectancy.  The cartoon depiction above of the effect on typhoid deaths is a good example.  Once science was able to demonstrate that typhoid was caused by the Salmonella bacterium and that the major pathway to infection was the ingestion of food or water contaminated by the feces of an infected person, then effective preventative measures were obvious and implementation of sanitation practices, water filtration, and chlorination led to dramatic decreases in the incidence and death rates associated with that awful disease.  In less than 30 years the typhoid death rate dropped from 80 to 100 per 100,000 to 7 per 100,000.  Many equally or more dramatic results with other diseases came with the development of the so-called "miracle drugs" (penicillin, streptomycin and others)  that scientific medicine discovered in the early decades of the 20th Century.  From 1900 to 1940, mortality rates in the U.S. fell by 40% with an average decline of about 1% per year during that period.  Life expectancy at birth during that same period rose from age 47 to age 63.  

As genealogical illustrations of the effects of this amazing leap in scientific medicine and disease prevention and treatment, we can look at subsequent generations in the family examples summarized above.  Two generations of even a very privileged and affluent family such as the Aldrich/Rockefellers can illustrate the point.  The generation of the children of Nelson and Abby Pearce Aldrich born in the late 1860s - 1880s suffered three disease-related deaths before age four and two who lived to adulthood, but with severe disease-caused hearing disabilities.  One generation later when Abby Greene Aldrich Rockefeller had six children of her own, all born between 1903 and 1915, all six lived to adulthood and into their 70s - 90s (except for one son who died at 61).

In my own family, my maternal grandmother's parents lost half of their six children born between 1892 and 1902 to disease.  My grandmother herself had three children born between 1927 and 1932.  All of them lived to adulthood and two are still alive and well in their 80s.  Her one son, my uncle, died just a few weeks before his 75th birthday.  My paternal grandfather's parents lost three of their five children to disease before age two, but my grandfather's three children all survived and today are ages 91, 87 and 80.         

So we, as genealogists, can help remind folks that we can achieve -- and have in the past achieved -- stunning advances in medicine, disease prevention and treatment, and in the provision of general healthcare in order to make the lives of all of our families more safe, secure and long lasting (no matter whether we are poor, middle class or rich).  We only need the determination to do it and the memory to heed the lessons of the past. 

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For more regarding the information referenced above see . . . 

Bernice Kert, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family (New York, New York: Random House 1993).

David Cutler and Grant Miller, The Role of Public Health Improvements in Health Advances: The 20th Century United States (http://scholar.harvard.edu/cutler/files/cutler_miller_cities.pdf , February 2004).

John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York, New York: Viking Penguin 2004).

2011 Book of the Year, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Comparative National Statistics, pp. 742-743 "World and regional summaries," and pp. 810 - 815 "Health services."
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Copyright 2013, John D. Tew
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Why Genealogy? -- Reason No. 222 (October 10, 2013)

I have been reading The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty, a 1976 biography of the Rockefeller family covering the clan from William Avery Rockefeller and Eliza Davison, the parents of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (founder of the family fortune), through "The Cousins," who are the children of the five sons and one daughter of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and his wife Abigail Greene Aldrich (she of the Rhode Island Aldriches and daughter of U.S. Senator Nelson W. Aldrich).  Since the book was published in 1976, "The Cousins" that the book ends with are the generation that includes John D. "Jay" Rockefeller IV, the senior U.S. Senator from West Virginia (now age 76).  This "family biography" by Peter Collier and David Horowitz is a detailed and lengthy 626 pages (including the Epilogue) and it is followed by an additional 104 pages of Biographic Notes, citation Notes, and a family genealogy chart.  I highly recommend the book for those with an interest in history or economics, and I definitely recommend the book for those with a generalized interest in genealogy!

I found The Rockefellers to be of interest to my genealogy research for a number of reasons, but one particular account in the book struck a familiar note for me and it became the prompt for this post about yet another reason why I think families should have (or encourage) at least one member in each generation to pursue and record as much as possible about the family's history. [While I have referred to other reasons for pursuing genealogy elsewhere on this blog (see, for example, my "Immortality" series and the posts here and here), my selection of "Reason No. 222" here is just a random way of indicating there are many, many reasons for "doing genealogy!"] 

In writing about the twenty-three members of the generation known as "The Cousins," the authors of The Rockefellers state,

                    Mitzi, Rodman, and a couple of the older ones have vague recollections of
                    great-grandfather -- the thinly delicate, parchment-skinned founder of
                    Standard Oil.  Yet for most, he was only an image in the old Pathe newsreels
                    the Family Office had spliced together in a kind of elaborate home movie to
                    show at Christmas parties -- an oddly Chaplinesque figure doffing his hat and
                    dropping dimes into the outstretched hands of children.
                    [The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty, p. 510]

My paternal grandfather died one month before I turned six years old, so I have some direct, personal experiences and memories about him; but my younger brother was not born until a little over three years after my grandfather died -- he never knew his paternal grandfather and thus has no personal, experiential connection to him whatsoever.  Similarly, my maternal grandfather died just three months before I turned ten years old and my younger brother was not yet nine months old.  For my younger brother, his concept of "grandfather" consists of images of men he never knew and occasional stories to which he is basically a by-stander.  By contrast, our two sons (now 27 and 29) still have a living paternal grandfather and their maternal grandfather died when they were both in their early 20s -- so they grew up with very close connection and lots of shared experiences with both of their grandfathers.  Their concept of "grandfather" is necessarily much different than that of my younger brother.  Not everyone is as fortunate as our sons and so what is usually the first and most immediate nexus with their family history/genealogy is lost or very shallow and ephemeral. And so THIS is yet another reason why we should all be interested in genealogy.

A family commitment to developing a tradition of recording and preserving family history (genealogy) allows family members to make connections to ancestors that might not otherwise exist -- even for ancestors as close and immediate as grandparents.  We who are the family genealogists of our generation have the interest and opportunity to develop, record and preserve the photographs, anecdotes, interviews, and now even the DNA data that will allow even remote descendants to have something more than just "vague recollections" or captured images of their ancestors.  We can help them establish something approaching a more real, concrete "relationship" between themselves and the otherwise almost mythical people who made actual DNA and social contributions to the intrinsic nature and indispensable qualities of who they are!
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The photograph above is a scanned image of the dust jacket from the author's hardback copy of Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American Dynasty ( New York, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1976).
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Copyright 2013, John D. Tew
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