Author Archives: kathy

Sepia Saturday: An Uncle I Never Knew – Funeral Record

Posted on by
11

The month of January and a health emergency declared in the northwestern U. S. because of a measles outbreak had me thinking about an uncle I never knew.

This is a continuing series about my uncle Wilbur Thomas Hoskins, who died at five years of age due to complications following measles. You can catch up here:
A Tow-Headed Boy
Measles
Who was with the family?

On Monday, January 20, 1930, Tom Hoskins made a payment toward the funeral expenses for his young son, Wilbur. The $78 bill included embalming, a casket, and hearse. Tom paid $42, leaving a balance of $36.

The funeral service was held the same day at the residence of Tom, Eveline, and Wilbur at 406 S. Church St. in Rockford, Illinois. The only information about the funeral is found in a Memorial Record book provided to the family.

My grandmother used a pencil to add information to the record.

Name    Wilbur Thomas Hoskins
Born      April 3, 1924
Mystic, Iowa
Passed Away  Jan 18-1930
Rockford, Illinois
Age      5 Years   9 Months    15 Days

I do not know who Harry Cobble was. Perhaps the family was living in a boarding house, or rented rooms from Harry Cobble.

Services
At    Harry Cobble
       406 S. Church St.
Officiating Clergy
      Salvation Army Captain
Music
     S. Army Lassies
By

Cemetery
     Wilwood

The rest of the Funeral Record is blank.

  

My grandmother did not record any “floral tributes,” but there are a couple of cards that look like they might have come with flowers.

Parents of Tom Hoskins

Tom and Eveline Hoskins

Mr. and Mrs. J. O. Hitchcock Mr. and Mrs. Joe Hitchcock

I don’t know who the Hitchcocks are, but I found entries that seem to match in the 1930 Rockford city directory.

Although the funeral record does not list attendees, I can assume that those present were Tom’s sister Ethel and her husband Mark Bland; Eveline’s sister Marjorie Coates; and Tom’s brother Warren Hoskins. Perhaps the Hitchcocks were there. If my grandparents rented a room from Harry Cobble, maybe he was also in attendance.

Albert Hoskins

Eveline was in the first trimester of pregnancy with my mother, who would be born the first week of July. Missing from the family group was Tom’s and Eveline’s other son, Albert, who had remained in Mystic, Iowa with his grandparents and had not come with his parents to Rockford.

It is especially heartbreaking to realize that my grandparents buried Wilbur on the day of younger son Albert’s fourth birthday. How they must have longed to hold both boys in their arms that day.

Grandma noted in the funeral record that the Salvation Army Captain was the officiating clergy and the Salvation Army Lassies provided music. I wanted to know more about what the funeral service might have been like and found The Salvation Army Central Territory Historical Museum. We have been in contact through email and I was told to expect an answer to my questions on Monday.

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday. Please visit others who have responded to the prompt this week.

Sepia Saturday provides bloggers with an opportunity to share their history through the medium of photographs. Historical photographs of any age or kind become the launchpad for explorations of family history, local history and social history in fact or fiction, poetry or prose, words or further images. If you want to play along, sign up to the link, try to visit as many of the other participants as possible, and have fun.

Sepia Saturday: An Uncle I Never Knew – Who was with the family?

Posted on by
4

The month of January and a health emergency declared in the northwestern U. S. because of a measles outbreak had me thinking about an uncle I never knew.

This is a continuing series about my uncle Wilbur Thomas Hoskins, who died in 1930 at five years of age due to complications following measles. You can catch up here:
An Uncle I Never Knew – A Tow-Headed Boy
An Uncle I Never Knew – Measles

I thought I had this post almost finished, but I’m starting over. I reread some things and did a little more research and hope I’ll be able to pull something together. I’m also dealing with a brain that doesn’t like screens post surgery and that has REALLY slowed me down!

Yesterday I spent time trying to place my grandparents and their siblings during the time of Uncle Wilbur’s illness and death. Wilbur’s parents (my grandparents, Tom and Eveline Hoskins) and their siblings were raised in Mystic, Iowa. Most of the men were coal miners. Mining was not always steady work and the Great Depression made matters worse. A few left Mystic for work in Rockford, Illinois. At first, I thought only my grandfather and his brother Warren were in Rockford, but I was wrong. It looks like their sister Ethel may have been the first of the group to settle in Rockford. Ethel and her husband, Mark Bland, make an appearance in the 1927 Rockford city directory along with several members of Mark’s extended family.

1927 Rockford city directory

I’m a little confused by the 1928 city directory. I’m not sure if the Ethel listed as a cashier living at a different address from Mark Bland is our Ethel or someone else.

In the 1929 city directory, Ethel and Mark, Tom, and Warren are living at 831 Kishwaukee in Rockford and the extended Bland family is consolidated on Kishwaukee Street.

I suspect one other member of Tom’s and Eveline’s extended family was in Rockford when Wilbur died. I found Eveline’s sister Marjorie Coates in the 1930 census in Rockford, although I have not found her in the city directories. A letter from their sister Blanche also places Marjorie in Rockford.

It’s been comforting to know that Margie has been with you doing the little acts of kindness that I would have been glad to do; you have always been so good to me. An I know you realize how hard it is for me to get out with four little ones and the weather staying 26 below.

I started trying to piece this together while thinking about the funeral for little Wilbur and wondering who was there. The information recorded in the Funeral Record book is sparse. It does not include the names of those present, or even the date of the funeral. I guess Grandma did the best she could under the circumstances.

I was able to determine the date of the funeral from two sources. The first is a newspaper clipping that is a mixed bag of correct and incorrect information.

First name correct. Middle and last name incorrect.
Age correct.
Parent’s first name correct. Last name incorrect.
Address correct.
Day of death matches death certificate; time does not.
Location of death correct.
Cause of death pneumonia – does not match death certificate.
Day of funeral – Monday

The second is the letter mentioned above from Blanche Coates. The letter is dated January 23rd and confirms that the funeral was held on Monday, January 20th.

If we had only know you were not taking the little fellow home we could have been there Monday, By driving as far as Elgin in the car then taking the bus. But we did not know and Im very, very sorry.

Blanche Coates and her husband Miles Bankson were living in Wheeling, Illinois when Wilbur died. She assumed her sister’s family would take Wilbur back to Mystic for burial and realized too late that they could have made it to the funeral.

My guess is that my that my grandmother Eveline and little Wilbur may have only been in Rockford for a few weeks when he became ill. Ethel and her husband Mark had been in Rockford a couple of years and Marjorie may have left for Rockford sometime in 1929 – or maybe came with Eveline and Wilbur. Most of the extended family remained in Mystic. Google maps gives the distance from Mystic to Rockford as a little over 300 miles and a trip of five hours by car today. Who knows how long the trip took in 1930?

It is comforting to know that there was at least some family with my grandparents during Wilbur’s illness and immediately following his death.

Ethel Hoskins and Mark Bland

Warren Hoskins

Marjorie Coates

This is about all my surgery-rattled brain can put together this week and is my contribution to Sepia Saturday.

Sepia Saturday provides bloggers with an opportunity to share their history through the medium of photographs. Historical photographs of any age or kind become the launchpad for explorations of family history, local history and social history in fact or fiction, poetry or prose, words or further images. If you want to play along, sign up to the link, try to visit as many of the other participants as possible, and have fun.

Please visit other participants at Sepia Saturday.

Sepia Saturday – An Uncle I Never Knew: Measles

Posted on by
7

The month of January and a public health emergency declared in the northwestern U.S. because of a measles outbreak had me thinking about an uncle I never knew.

Wilbur Thomas Hoskins

This is second in a series about my uncle, Wilbur Thomas Hoskins. You can read the first installment here: An Uncle I Never Knew – A Tow-Headed Boy.

1929 brought the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. Times were hard for a coal miner who couldn’t count on steady work. My grandfather, Tom Hoskins, went to Rockford, Illinois, hoping to provide for his family. I don’t know if brothers Tom and Warren left for Rockford together, or if Tom followed his brother there. Both are listed in the 1929 Rockford City Directory, but only Warren was employed at the time of publication.

I tried to look up Kish street in Rockford, but it doesn’t exist. Kish seems to be short for Kishwaukee. Google street view shows their address as recently vacant/under construction, but this building, built in 1921, would have been across the street from them on the corner.

It was imperative that Tom find a way to provide for his growing family. In 1929 Wilbur was five; Albert was three; and by the end of the year, Eveline was expecting a third child, my mother.

Eveline and Wilbur joined Tom in Rockford, but little Albert was left in the care of his maternal grandmother in their hometown of Mystic, Iowa. They were living at 406 S. Church Street in January of 1930 when Wilbur became ill. Among my grandmother’s papers were receipts for payments made for Wilbur’s medical care. They included Dr. Charles L. Leonard, Dr. R. M. Bissekumer, and St. Anthony’s Hospital.

The best efforts of his parents and the medical professionals were not enough to save Wilbur’s life. At 5:00 a.m. on January 18, 1930, Wilbur died at the age of 5 years, 9 months and 15 days while hospitalized at St. Anthony’s Hospital.

The cause of death recorded on Wilbur’s death certificate is “acute nephritis”, or inflammation of the kidneys. Contributory (secondary) cause of death – measles.

I interpret the death certificate this way: little Wilbur contracted the measles, developed inflammation of the kidneys as a complication, and this resulted in kidney failure. Inflammation of the kidney’s used to be called Bright’s Disease and this is what I had heard caused Wilbur’s death. There is a history of kidney problems among the male members of our family, so it is possible that Wilbur had an underlying condition.

One of the most common complications of measles, which often resulted in death, was pneumonia. The death notice in the newspaper (with a mix of facts and misinformation) cites pneumonia as the cause of death.

The death certificate shaved a month and two days off of Wilbur’s age. My grandmother, a former school teacher and stickler for details had her own accounting in the funeral record and hers are the numbers I used above.

People so easily forget how devastating a disease can be when it is no longer a part of our common experience. How else can we explain the growing number of people who do not vaccinate their children and the health emergency currently happening in northwestern states? This became personal for me when I had a stem cell transplant and lost all of my immunities. I had to repeat all of my vaccinations and be vaccinated for childhood diseases that I had as a child. I had to wait two years to receive vaccinations if they contained a live virus. When cases of measles made the news in my city while I was unprotected, I felt vulnerable. Vaccinations not only protect our own children, but people who are unprotected and have no control over it.

“Health officials in Washington have declared a state of emergency and are urging immunization as they scramble to contain a measles outbreak in two counties, while the number of cases of the potentially deadly virus continues to climb in a region with lower-than-normal vaccination rates.” (NPR)

“Before the widespread use of the vaccine, measles was so common that infection was felt to be “as inevitable as death and taxes.” In the United States, reported cases of measles fell from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands per year following introduction of the vaccine in 1963. Increasing uptake of the vaccine following outbreaks in 1971 and 1977 brought this down to thousands of cases per year in the 1980s. An outbreak of almost 30,000 cases in 1990 led to a renewed push for vaccination and the addition of a second vaccine to the recommended schedule. No more than than 220 cases were reported in any year from 1997 to 2013, and the disease was believed no longer endemic in the United States. In 2014, 667 cases were reported.” (Wikipedia)

Although this post has no images that reflect the theme image for this week, it is my contribution to Sepia Saturday. Please visit others who have responded to the prompt this week.

Sepia Saturday 456 : 9 February 2019

Sepia Saturday provides bloggers with an opportunity to share their history through the medium of photographs. Historical photographs of any age or kind become the launchpad for explorations of family history, local history and social history in fact or fiction, poetry or prose, words or further images. If you want to play along, sign up to the link, try to visit as many of the other participants as possible, and have fun.