The theme "gone too soon" makes me think about young people dying in wars, childhood deaths, and all the mothers and fathers I have encountered in my genealogy work who died well before their children grew to adulthood. Today I write about one of those mothers, my great-great-grandmother on my maternal line, Carolina Nilsdotter.
I imagine a play, a tragedy. The setting: 1853, Sweden. Enter stage right, Carolina, now a 10-year-old red-headed girl, her two older sisters Maria Lena and Anna Christine, a younger half-sister Charlotte and two half-brothers Lars Frederick and Carl Johan, her mother Christina ("Sara" in this record) and step-father Karl Johnson. They are packed and ready for their journey to America. Another companion: a small microbe that today we call Mycobacterium tuberculosis...
The family arrives in Boston after months sailing on the ocean, heads to Chicago by rail, and lives there 2 years before settling in Geneseo, in western Illinois. Carolina matures over the next 4 years, and marries Lars Johnson at age 16; he is 34. We only have one photo of Carolina – photography was still pretty rare then – perhaps taken for her wedding when she was 16, or somewhat later:
Carolina and Lars have 8 children over then next 13 years; 3 die as infants (at 6 months, 5 months, and 2 weeks). And then tuberculosis (TB) takes Carolina's life, the first of October, 1872, leaving behind 5 motherless children: Lottie (my great-grandmother) 12, Sophie 10, Mary 7, Anna 3 1/2, and Lars Fredrick 2 months. Carolina is buried alongside her older sister Anna who died of TB just 6 years earlier at age 26.
A family story, as told by my second cousin Linda, provides a good illustration of what followed:
"At that point 4 year-old Anna went to live with her mother's half brother, Fred Johnson and his wife, while the three elder girls, Lottie, Sophie and Mary, tended their baby brother. The girls would take turns staying home from school, and would wash their school dress and Fred's baby things on the day home. Supposedly, 8 year-old Mary got bored one day and took baby Fred up on the roof: she climbed onto the coal bin, onto the shanty (back porch), then on to the roof of the one story kitchen, then up to the two story part. Supposedly a neighbor who was driving by saw her and Fred on the roof. He thereupon tied up his team, climbed up onto the roof, took the baby and helped Mary down. He told Mary to never do that again. According to Johnson family narrative, this showed that these children needed a mother."
Here are the oldest three daughters Sophie, Mary, and Lottie, in their mid- to late- teens:
Their father Lars did remarry, almost 2 years after Carolina's death, to Christina Andersdotter, a 21-year-old woman with a young child, and ended up fathering 8 more children before he himself succumbed to TB at age 66. Carolina's 5 children managed to survive childhood and marry; this photo shows them together as young adults:
Both Sophie and Lottie (my great-grandmother) also died of TB, at ages 41 and 44. Sophie left a family of 3 young children; Lottie left behind 6 children, including my grandmother Lillian who was 15. Lottie's husband died of TB just 6 years after that.
After moving to Colorado and marrying my grandfather Dan Knaus, Lillian made sure the family slept with the windows open, even in wintertime. My grandmother never knew her grandmother, but she did know tuberculosis. The disease killed a sister, both her parents, an aunt, three grandparents, a great-aunt, as well as other ancestors back in Sweden.
A little more on TB...
It would be nice to be able to say that tuberculosis is a disease of the past, but it is unfortunately still with us today, killing 1 1/2 million people each year, and infecting millions more. It has been with us since history was first recorded, and yet it would be possible to eradicate it with a strong international effort, given the political will. Here are a few sources I found interesting:
Geiter, Lawrence. 2000. Ending Neglect: The Elimination of Tuberculosis in the United States. United Kingdom: National Academies Press. This can be previewed here on Google Books.
“Global Tuberculosis Report.” 2022. Geneva: World Health organization. https://www.who.int/teams/global-tuberculosis-programme/tb-reports/global-tuberculosis-report-2022. Current state of TB in the world. Eradication efforts, and set backs due to Covid pandemic.
Leão, Silvia Cardoso et al. 2007. “Chapter 1: History.” In Tuberculosis 2007. https://tuberculosistextbook.com/tb/history.htm. Comprehensive online text book. Good section on history of the disease.
“Questions and Answers about Tuberculosis.” 2021. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/tb/publications/faqs/pdfs/qa.pdf.
“Tuberculosis.” 2023. World Health Organization. 2023. https://www.who.int/health-topics/tuberculosis.
“Tuberculosis (TB).” 2022. American Lung Association. 2022. https://www.lung.org/lung-health-diseases/lung-disease-lookup/tuberculosis. The American Lung Association was actually founded in 1904 as the “National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis” to fight TB, changing to its present name in 1973.
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