2024 #52Ancestors, Week 25: Storyteller

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The Importance of Storytelling

2024 #52Ancestors, Week 24: Hard Times

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Hard Times

2024 #52Ancestors, Week 23: Health

Back to the Pearsons for this week.  Let's talk about heart problems.

William Pearson and family (spouse and children) all died from various heart ailments.  While William and his wife, Flora, lived into their seventies, their children were not as fortunate.

William, who died at 76 (roughly - his date of birth varies from 1878-1883), died from arteriosclerosis, commonly described as the hardening of the arteries.  Considering that he died in 1960, and the average life expectancy in the United States was 76 years in 2021, William had a pretty good run. 

His wife, Flora (Deven) Pearson, died at 70 from anteroseptal myocardial infarction (ASMI).  Contributing factors included a cerebrovascular accident (CVA) and a superior mesenteric artery (SMA) embolism.  For you non-medical people (of which I'm one), let me try to break that down.  ASMI is a type of heart attack commonly caused by the rupturing of plaque in the arteries.  CVA is a disruption of blood flow to the brain - a stroke.  An SMA embolism is when a clot breaks free of the heart, and the blockage cuts off blood flow to part of the intestine.  So, it sounds like some plaque broke loose in Flora's arteries.  The traveling plaque caused a heart attack, a stroke, and impaired blood flow to the intestines.

That's a lot of heart issues for two people, and unfortunately, heart problems are often hereditary.  In fact, Flora's mother died from mitral regurgitation (MR) - a heart valve disease, and Flora's father died from chronic myocarditis. William and Flora proved that heart problems don't necessarily mean an abbreviated lifespan, but that would not be the case for Dolores and Theodore, their children, neither one of which lived past the age of 17.

Dolores died in 1928 of chronic endocarditis and myocarditis (sound familiar?).  Basically, she suffered from inflammation of the heart.  Genetics can play a role in endocarditis, and looking at her parents' (and grandparents') death certificates, it seems likely this was the case for Dolores. She was just 16 when she died.

Her brother, Theodore, died in 1930 from acute endocarditis.  Whereas Dolores's ailment was chronic, Theodore experienced a sudden onset of heart inflammation.  It's difficult to read the handwriting, but it looks like Theodore was first seen for this illness on April 26th, and he died on May 8th, aged 17.

As previously stated, I do not work in the medical field, so if I got any of this wrong, please let me know!

2024 #52Ancestors, Week 22: Creativity

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Creativity

2024 #52Ancestors, Week 21: Nicknames

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Nicknames

2024 #52Ancestors, Week 20: Taking Care of Business

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Taking Care of Business

#52Ancestors #Week22 #Creativity

As a woman of a certain age, I'm quite familiar with advice on keeping your brain sharp.  Crosswords, they say.

Well, just lately as Cuzzin Rachel and I try to untangle to supporting lines of our Pearson ancestors, we've had to be plenty creative.  For instance, how many ways can one spell "John Staton"? There are John, Jon, possible Jonathans, the archaic abbreviation Jno., and Jack.  And the surname has been spelled variously as Stanton, Staten (like the island), Staton, Stayton and Stayden. If we're looking at handwritten documents from the 1700 and early 1800's, "S" is written as "F", and best of luck making out most of the rest.

Trying to use the "Find" feature in lengthy documents or indexes is even more challenging when your many-times great grandfather's surname is "Field." There are a lot of them, too.  An old Virginia family, with English names like John and Jane here as well, although they kindly named one son Obadiah.

The other place where we essentially have to play something akin to paper Jenga is maps or land records. County boundaries changed frequently, forming new counties of (often) two or three pieces from mutliple older counties. With sometimes slim or missing residential information, we have a group of about 7 counties in Kentucky that I look at regularly for the same people.

Who needs crosswords? (With apologies to my crossword partner, you know who you are!)