Follow Friday ~ The 1918 Flu Epidemic

A few years ago I wrote a blog post about the Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918.  At the time, we were experiencing a terrible flu outbreak in 2009.  Here are again in 2013, experiencing another flu outbreak, and somewhere families are being affected.   Death, and its aftermath can change your family history in unimaginable ways.  In 2009 I blogged about a young father dying, causing his children to be farmed out to family members, and my grandfather (the brother-in-law, yet only a teenager) had to quit school at 8^th grade and go be “the man of the family” to his sisters household.  The death of his brother-in-law changed his life forever.

US. Naval History and Heritage Command Photo #: NH 41731-A

Did the 1918 Flu affect your family? Perhaps you had some young person die in 1918 and didn’t realize that it was due to this epidemic? What was the aftermath.  This disaster killed mostly young people, many of them young parents.

Some recent, and some not so recent, genealogy blog posts about the 1918 influenza epidemic:

Pam Carter “Influenza 1918”
http://mymaineancestry.blogspot.com/2013/01/influenza-1918.html   

Jim Craig “Influenza Part II: Their Only Son: Wesley Gillette Dempster” http://undereverystone.blogspot.com/2012/02/influenza-part-ii-their-only-son.html

Elroy Davis "Sickness Saturday - Influenza 1918"
http://greenmountaingenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/02/sickness-saturday-influenza-1918.html

Gail Grunst “Honoring Ancestors who Died too Young: Hugo Kaiser” http://gailgrunstgenealogy.wordpress.com/tag/influenza-1919/

Naomi “Serial Mother- The Story of Eva, Ch. 1” http://seattlemexicanfoodblog.typepad.com/vvblog/2012/09/serial-mother-the-story-of-eva-ch-1.html

Ryan Owen “1918: Spanish Influenza Invades Massachusetts”  

http://forgottennewengland.com/2011/12/17/1918-spanish-influenza-invades-massachusetts/

Maurine Pool “Death in the Family: 1918 Spanish Flu” 

http://torresfamilyhistorynm.blogspot.com/2012/10/death-in-family-1918-spanish-flu.html

Barbara Poole “Frances and the Flu”
http://lifefromtheroots.blogspot.com/2013/01/frances-and-flu.html

John Tew “The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918” http://filiopietismprism.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-great-influenza-pandemic-of-1918.html

Miriam Robbins "Jennie James Valk"
http://ancestories1.blogspot.com/2008/03/jennie-james-valk_20.html

Bill West "Floyd E. West, Sr. at Camp Devens, Sept. 1918"
http://westinnewengland.blogspot.com/2008/01/floyd-e-west-sr-at-fort-devens-sept1918.html

Carol Bowen Stevens "1918 Flu Epidemic, Quarantine Rules"
http://www.reflectionsfromthefence.com/2010/02/1918-flu-epidemic-quarantine-rules.html

Cynthia Shenette wrote a three part series about the epidemic at her blog "Heritage Zen" You can catch the first post at this link, and click on parts 2 and 3:
 http://heritagezen.blogspot.com/2011/01/flu-1918-part-1-of-3-amanuensis-monday.html

This one is from Roxanne Saucier's genealogy column in the Bangor Daily News "Millinocket Mother one of  Maine's 5,000 influenza casualties in 1918" http://bangordailynews.com/2013/01/19/living/millinocket-mother-one-of-maines-5000-influenza-casualties-in-1918/

And last, but not least, my own blog post from 2009 about how a 1918 influenza death affected the history of my family tree in a very sad way…

http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2009/10/spanish-flu-of-1918-and-family-history.html

If I missed a genealogy blog post about the 1918 “Spanish Flu” or any other interesting genealogy blog post about influenza, please leave a link in the comments below.

Update 4 March 2013
A great blog post from the MIT Alumni blog "Slice of MIT" about how the Institute handled the 1918 flu epidemic, and subsequent other flu pandemics: http://alum.mit.edu/pages/sliceofmit/2013/03/04/fighting-flu-at-mit-history/

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Published under a Creative Commons License

Heather Wilkinson Rojo, "Follow Friday ~ The 1918 Flu Epidemic", Nutfield Genealogy, posted 1 February 2013 ( http://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/02/follow-friday-1918-flu-epidemic.html: accessed [access date]).