If you really think about it, it hasn't been that long ago. My mother was born just ten years after that and she remembers life "back then". The grippe took many lives in the early 1900s, and my g'grandmother prided herself that her family escaped unscathed. She related to me how she boiled her laundry after washing it to kill germs and to this day I can smell in my memory the carbolic acid with which she disinfected her house until the day she died. My mother drove a car the first time when she was ten years old, because her gramps bought one and refused to learn to operate it. Licenses weren't mandatory and that would have been 1926.

Mules and horses actually still had a strong foothold in business into the mid to late 1930s. My great uncle was a teamster for a coal company and actually died in the mid-thirties from injuries sustained when falling into the team of mules. So, teamsters actually had teams! My parent's home had a stable under their barn (in the middle of the city residential area) for a team. Many city properties had stables in the thirties here and that's when their house was built.

Although 47 might have been the average life expectancy, how long a person can live hasn't changed much since then. Just more people attain it now, mostly because the decline of infant mortality and the availability of birth control. Back then, a woman just birthed until she wore out, dying often at the end of her child bearing years when she was still giving birth after her oldest children were married themselves.

Both of my parents were born at home, and all but one of my sisters and brother in laws were as well. come to think of it, so was my husband.

What I found amazing after research into historical documents over the last five or six years is not so much how different it was then compared to now, but how alike. What amazed me was that by 1866 there was already a successful transatlantic communication cable in place between Europe and the new world. Troops moved by train in the civil war and men actually came home on furloughs. Our city had main water and gas in the mid 1800s.

The fact that most doctors weren't college graduates would have astounded me if I hadn't recently read John Barry's book on the influenza epidemic of 1918. That book really opened my mind to how awful medical care was in the all too recent past.

And Suzy, I agree with you. I grew up with many older relatives who could vividly remember 1906.

The babies were born at home because there was seldom a nearby hospital. A baby that was large or misplaced was usually dismembered to save the mother's life. The doctors or midwives just didn't have a choice. Blood transfusions weren't available either for the mother that hemorraged.

I think one of the most horrible things that I ever saw was a collection of old ads from medical journals for instruments for dismembering the babies for extraction.

Next to my father's family plot, there is a lot that contains the parents and 7 tiny graves for their children. All of whom died before their first birthday. Some only lived a day or two. What was it? Some sort of RH negative blood factor? But can you imagine how a mother would feel?

It's tragic, isn't it? My grandmother was a diabetic, and obviously didn't know it for the majority of her life. My father weighed over thirteen pounds. Miraculously she did not lose any of her children in childbirth. She did lose one at two years of age the doctors told her would never make it past infancy from seizures, likely caused by birth trauma. There were hospitals close by in those days, but birthing was a "natural" process and going to hospital just wasn't something one did. When I had my first baby I lived in a rural area of the Ozarks. My first husband's grandmother wanted to know if I'd picked out a midwife yet, LOL. Even my husband was bent that I should have my baby at home, like his mother did with hers. I didn't listen.

No cars, no telephones, no indoor plumbing,no electrical devices of any kind. Modern technologies always come to rural places last. This picture happened to be labeled on the back and dated.

{{gwi:181472}}

I just got off the phone with my Grandma, who is recuperating from a nasty fall down the steps (and broken collarbone). Our conversation meandered in lots of different directions and she mentioned something about the SF earthquake of 1906. I did not know it until today, but her father (born 1876) was in San Francisco for the earthquake. He overseeing a road-building crew or something of the sort. I bet there's an interesting story there. He recounted jumping over giant chasms to get back to the city. Interesting tidbit of 100-years-ago trivia for me anyway...

As for the childbirth thing, I think of the great-grands on the other side of the family... who had 18 kids... 12 of whom were twins (six sets). All were born OK, but only 5 of them saw their 18th birthdays. I think clean drinking water and antibiotics would have cured most of what ailed them too...

A lot of children in the south, died from what was known as the "summer complaint." It was vomiting and diarhea that dehydrated the body. It was common before ice boxes came into wide spread use. The cooking habit was for a big noon time meal with the leftovers served for supper. By that time, some things would have spoiled enough to make the younger ones very ill.

I always thought my great grandfather was the eldest in his family. Turns out he was the baby with 4 older siblings. The 4 all died within a week during a diptheria epidemic. He was probably protected because his mother was nursing him.

Michelle, I hope you video tape or at least record these
conversations with your Grandmother.

My mom grew up in a mining town in Virginia. Typhoid nearly
wiped out the whole place. It seems there was a community
well and it was contaminated.

My mother had an aunt who lived in South Dakota and according to family lore was married to a "charming ne'er do well." When my mom was around 8 or so, so this would be around 1925 or 1926, her father decided to go up there to get her, taking the train to what must have been the back of beyond to people from Chicago.

To keep food on the table her aunt was a cook for the crews that came through harvesting wheat, and when they got to whatever town it was where the family lived, they found a post office/general store, a tavern, a silent movie house and a gas station and that was about it. Water for the town came from a town well, and while the businesses had electricity, most of the residences didn't. My grandfather pronounced the place unfit for habitation and promptly packed up the family (minus the ne'er do well") and brought them back to Chicago.

My mom always talked about how when they got back to the house in Chicago, the family was so fascinated by the toilet they kept flushing it over and over again.

One of my aunts was about 15 or 16 in July of 1906. She went on an all-day-at-the-beach 4th of July picnic. She came home, lay down, became comatose and died. No doctor available on Hilton Head Island in those days. People just did the best they could without one.

She was healthy. Why did she die? No one will ever know, but I have always wondered how the females managed in the heat dressed as they did then. Long sleeves, stockings, and petticoats and full skirts. Did all day in the sun with the usual southern July temperatures give her heat stroke? Did she get dehydrated? With boys around, would she have dared to go into the water to cool off?

1922 - my mother, the oldest of ten children, turned 14 and on her birthday went into "service". She lived in and was a maid-. She slept in the same bed with the cook and in due course became the cook herself. In rural communities that was pretty much what the girls did. The boys at 14 went down the mine as my father did.

That was pretty much the story for a poor, working class family, living in a rural area in those days.