A family from Kalida discovered a group of gravesites at the Saint Michaels Cemetery that belonged to a family that died within 11 days of each other from the 1918 Flu.
It’s important not to draw too many parallels between the Coronavirus and the flu that killed an estimated 50 million people in 1918, but this family decided to look back on what the world was like during a pandemic more than 100 years ago.
When Joyce Wurth drove to the cemetery with her daughters that day, they were just planning on visiting loved ones that were buried there. With the current pandemic going on limiting places they could spend time at, they decided to continue to wander through the cemetery.
That’s when they found a grave marker that read “This family died with the flu from the 3 to 14 December 1918.” They then noticed several other grave markers with the same last name, and with just a bit of research, they learned that 9 out of 10 children died along with their parents from the 1918 flu within days from each other.
Blyth Turnwald and her sister Beth Webb say it was surprising. “Initially, we didn’t see the children’s stones," says Turnwald. "We only saw the family stone that said this family died, so I think that’s why we started researching to figure out how many and we were blown away when we saw name, after name, after name of children.” Her sister Webb added, “In such a short amount of time.”
The daughters used findagrave.com to carry out their research, and the website was even able to find a newspaper clipping from the Akron Evening Times dated back to 1919 with the headline “NINE OF TEN IN ONE FAMILY DIE FROM FLU."
Joyce Wurth says, “It’s very interesting. I hope other people find it that way and, you know, just do a little bit of research. Even reading about the flu in 1918 was very interesting, we read some books about that.”
Their trip to the cemetery quickly became a reminder that we are not alone in this fight against COVID as even our ancestors had to battle through a deadly virus.
