Perspective and Family History

Researching genealogy does tend to keep my own current challenges in perspective. 

I already knew that one of my ancestors, Mary, who was living on the Iowa frontier, was the only surviving child of her parents by the time she was was 15 years old.  Her mother died of cholera when Mary was barely 13. 

Some new details discovered: Her father subsequently married a widow who was trying to raise and support her 3 orphaned stepchildren, ages 10-14 and two of her own children ages 7 and 4.

Within a year, Mary’s new stepmother died. Months afterwards, Mary’s father died.  

In other words, what I learned was that, in that family of six children ages 5-15, one of those orphaned children had lost both parents and a new stepmother, two had lost both parents and a new stepfather, and three had, lost their mother, their father, their stepmother and their stepfather to death.

How hard for those children those losses were. How hard it must have been for their parents and step-parents to know they were dying and leaving thieir children behind.

These six surviving children had no extended family members in the community. As was common in that era and that part of the world, they were split up and taken in by several different families in the area. Some of those families moved away. As I looked into the lives of those children I learned that some of those children lost contact with each other within a year, and were not able to find their siblings for another 50 years.

Perspective.