I was reading the Washington Post this morning and came across an article discussing a study showing that the blood of those who survived the 1918 flu pandemic were still producing antibodies 90 years later. It's a very interesting article. As I was reading, I remembered I had planned to write a post about this pandemic because I recently discovered my father's mother and older brother (Joseph Agazio) both got sick in 1918, but I just never really got around to writing it.
The only information I have on how the 1918 flu affected my family came in a story passed to me by my cousin. Apparently both my grandmother and uncle had this flu, and unfortunately my uncle died after only a few months of life. I'm not sure if my grandmother was sick while she was pregnant, or caught it afterwords, but she survived to have my father a couple of years later (fortunately for me). All I know of my uncle is he was born sometime in 1918, died the same year, and is buried somewhere in Boulder County. I find it curious I never heard anything about this story while growing up, and didn't even know I had an uncle named Joseph. I'm going to be visiting my brother in Colorado for 3 days in September and I plan on trying to find and take photos of Joseph's grave. I know the family was living in the town of Lafayette during the 1920 census while my grandfather worked as a coal miner, so this will be my starting point.
I found a few links to information on the 1918 flu pandemic (AKA Spanish Flu) you may find interesting:
The Great Pandemic - Department of Health and Human Services
Spanish Flu - Wikipedia
The 1918 Flu Epidemic - Gena's Genealogy (a fellow genea-blogger with interesting links on the subject)
Spanish Influenza Much Like Grippe - New York Times, September 22, 1918
New Influenza Cases Doubled - New York Times, September 28, 1918
85,000 In Bay State Ill With Influenza - New York Times, September 30, 1918
Lori,
Wow...the poor guy couldn't even be buried where he wanted. That is so sad. Fear makes us do strange things sometimes. Thanks for the comment!
Tim
Posted by: Tim Agazio | August 21, 2008 at 08:15 PM
Bill,
Thanks for the link to your post and to the book at Google...very interesting. That must have been a scary time...the number of people who got sick and died is really staggering. Thanks again.
Tim
Posted by: Tim Agazio | August 21, 2008 at 08:11 PM
After seeing that in Yahoo! News last night I was interested in finding out more about it. Shockingly I had never heard of this until I read the article, but then again I never searched for massive pandemic killers either I guess.
I wrote an article about this on my site.
Posted by: Billy | August 20, 2008 at 06:07 PM
My grandfather's brother died in the 1918 flu pandemic. He worked as a salesman and was living in Texarkana at the time of his death. He had wanted to be buried back in Mississippi, but they would not allow his body to be transported back. He's buried in the State Line Cemetery which is on the Arkansas side! His wife later moved to Denver, Colorado.
Posted by: Lori Thornton | August 19, 2008 at 07:10 PM
Tim,
I have a brief post about my grandfather serving at Camp Devens, Ma. during the epidemic at
http://westinnewengland.blogspot.com/2008/01/floyd-e-west-sr-at-fort-devens-sept1918.html
There's a link to a book at Googlebooks you might find interesting.
Bill West
Posted by: Bill West | August 19, 2008 at 10:21 AM