Mother Nature’s Cruel Tricks

My grandfather’s mother was not there for him!

While that sounds like an awful sentiment for a mother, I don’t mean that in the sense that she did not care about him or love him. I suspect he was the most precious thing in her life.

Grandfather James Pearson Shepheard was born on 12 March 1891. His mother, Mary Elizabeth (Pearson) Shepheard, died of phthisis (consumption or tuberculosis) on 4 October 1891, before he was seven months old. She was only 24. I wrote about her death in a blog post on my other blogsite, Discover Genealogy on 23 June 2015 (The Scourge of Phthisis).

Grandpa Shepheard never knew his mother and she never got to see him grow up. And because his father travelled a great deal in his job as a ship’s steward, his upbringing was left to relatives, first his maternal grandparents, but for most of his early life, his father’s brother and his wife.

Is there a crueler trick that Mother Nature can play than taking away a child’s mother before an infant can even understand what has happened? For my grandfather, losing his mother was a life-changing event, although he would not have known it at the time. It was to set up situations beyond his control, but that had wide-reaching impacts on his life.

Great-grandfather Charles Pearson died in 1892. Grandpa Shepheard was then in the care of his grandmother, Susanna Pearson, in Leamington Prior, Warwick. Following her death in 1895 he came to live with his aunt and uncle in Torquay, Devon. He would have begun school at about that time as well. They later relocated to Taunton, Dorset.

Grandpa Shepheard left England at a very young age. Perhaps, with absent parents, he had been conditioned to be self-reliant and wanted to strike out on his own. Always the optimist, he embarked with other young men on a ship to Canada at the age of 17. Grandpa worked his way across Canada, finally settling and marrying in Alberta in 1914. Jimmy, as he was known, was a respected and locally renowned horseman, also noted for becoming the master over any and all mean broncs. His father joined him to farm in Alberta in 1913.

Despite the distressing circumstances of his early life, my grandfather was known as a very happy child and man. He could often be heard singing in his clear tenor voice, whether in church, meeting halls or tending animals in the field. He was sociable and full of fun and we certainly always remember him with a smile.

It was not as unusual in previous centuries for people to die at a young age, with diseases such as tuberculosis rampant (see Discover Genealogy blog post 26 September 2017, Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 7: Disease). We have several examples in our families where one of the parents was stricken with what proved to be an untreatable or unbeatable illness. Many ancestors of my wife and me died of tuberculosis, often leaving small children behind. Women occasionally did not survive childbirth. Medical care throughout pregnancies and the birth process were not as advanced as they are today.

Other epidemics also struck people down in large numbers: cholera, dysentery, typhoid fever, typhus fever, yellow fever, puerperal fever, tuberculosis, pneumonia, influenza, scarlet fever, smallpox, measles, diphtheria and whooping cough. Their impacts were only alleviated with the move to better hygiene, improved practices of health care and the use of vaccines.

Sometimes tuberculosis was a result of the confinement of people for other reasons. My wife’s grandmother was institutionalized for mental problems in 1918, at the age of 33. The only hospitals for these types of ailments in Scotland at the time were where patients with tuberculosis were confined. The result was that many, physically healthy patients contracted the disease. Elizbeth (Walker) Cooper’s death record shows she died in the Woodilee Asylum of Pulmonary Tuberculosis and Organic Brain Disease in 1922.

Upon her commitment, she left her husband unprepared to care for six children ranging in age from one to ten. The loss of their mother was also traumatic for of them in many and different ways. The circumstances certainly impacted their entire lives, as well as their relationship with their father.

Disease shows up as one of Mother Nature’s most virulent traits, attacking at random and indiscriminately. Individuals and families can suffer both immediate and long-term effects. There are probably very few families that have not experienced loss or unhappiness from serious illnesses. Nor many that have not been subject, at one time or another, to such cruel tricks of nature.