One of the tough things about genealogy is that sometimes
you find out about sad things that happened to people that you care about. Happily,
sometimes you find out that things turn out all right in the end, but other times
that sad note is the one your research ends on. And even though you may have
never met these people personally, you can’t help but imagine what they and the
people around them must have felt when tragedy struck.
Such is the case with my great-great-grandmother Rose Anne (Allen)
Sheppard, her husband Samuel, and their daughter Katherine.
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| Possibly an image of Rose, found with Katherine's papers. |
Rose is one of those people for whom I wish I had more
records. Between state and federal census records, I’ve been able to find out
about her life in 1905, 1910, and 1915. The 1913 Salem, NJ
Farm Directory gives me a little detail as well. Between them, they tell me
that she was the wife of a farm laborer in Salem County, New Jersey.
Given that the major local crops were corn and potatoes – Salem produced 939,775 bushels of corn, 1,303,088
of white potatoes, and 459,592 of sweet potatoes in 1910 – Samuel probably came
home exhausted from back-breaking labor. Rose herself sometimes did housework “out,”
meaning as a domestic, which is not surprising given the types of jobs
available for black women in her era. Overall, the family was probably poor but
not destitute – they never owned their own home or farm, according to the
records, but they did own a Bell
telephone in 1913, and Samuel always seemed to be employed.
They probably also valued education; while the 1905 NJ Census
says that neither Samuel nor Rose could read or write, both the 1910 Federal Census and
1915 NJ Census say they can. They either already knew how in 1905 and the
information was incorrect, or they put in the effort and learned. And Katherine
was in school when she was 7 and when she was 12.
Rose had been born somewhere in Virginia,
but how, when or why she arrived in New
Jersey, I do not know. We don’t have her birth
certificate. Records suggest that she married Samuel around 1905, but we don’t
have their marriage record either. The records are pointing more and more firmly towards her having had at least 2 sisters and 1 brother; one sister,
Bertha, was close by, also in Salem County, and another, Eleanor, wasn’t too far away, in
Washington, DC. But, we can’t find the siblings living
together in 1900, nor have I found any vital or census records of their parents
– they exist as ghosts on their daughters’ paperwork at this point. And Rose
herself was proving difficult to find after 1915. By 1920, her daughter
Katherine had moved to Washington,
DC.
So what had happened? Two guesses came to mind: 1) She had
died sometime soon after 1915, or 2) She and Samuel had separated or gotten
divorced, and perhaps she had remarried. Sadly, my first guess was true.
On July 26, 1916, this notice appeared in the local
newspaper, the Salem Standard and Jerseyman:
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| From the Salem County Historical Society clippings file. |
As you can see, Rose passed away on July 16, 1916, when she
was just 34 years old. What happened? This is where it gets heartbreaking. Here is a copy of her Certificate of
Death:
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| Note: This document gives her parents' surname as Ellis. Other documents suggest her maiden name was Allen. |
Rose was 7 months
pregnant when she died. In fact complications from her pregnancy may have led to
her death. For two weeks before she died, she had been attended to by a doctor
due to uremia, who noted that Rose had albuminuria. According to the National
Kidney Foundation, albuminuria is when you have too much protein in your urine;
it generally signals that your kidneys are damaged. The condition is linked to
kidney disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and also smoking.
Uremia, according to WebMD, is “a serious complication of chronic
kidney disease and acute kidney injury…It occurs when urea and other waste
products build up in the body because the kidneys are unable to eliminate them.
These substances can become poisonous (toxic) to the body if they reach high
levels.” Unfortunately, pregnancy puts
an increased strain on the kidneys; if Rose’s kidneys had been struggling along
due to diabetes or hypertension, her pregnancy may have been the thing that
pushed them over the edge.
Some of the symptoms she might have experienced include: nausea,
vomiting, loss of appetite, weight loss, confusion, seizures, abnormal bleeding,
and shortness of breath. How horrible for Rose to have experienced any of this!
How horrible for Samuel and Katherine to have witnessed her going through this,
especially with Katherine being 12 or 13 at the time. Imagine them worrying
about their wife and mother and about
the baby she was carrying, and then having to bury them both.
Rose’s death certificate says that she was laid to rest in
the cemetery of Mt.
Pisgah, an African Methodist Episcopal Church in Salem. While other headstones do exist, there
is no tombstone for Rose, and no formal records of interments at the cemetery.
What happens next for the family? In September of 1918,
Samuel registers for the “Old Man’s Draft” for World War I. Luckily, the war
ends on November 11th that same year; no records yet found suggest he was
called to serve. As for Katherine, a handwritten note among family papers
states that she moved to Washington,
DC on Christmas Eve.
She would live there for at least the next 22 years, most of that time with her
aunt Eleanor. But why did she leave her father behind, or why did he send her
away? Did he think she would be better off with his wife’s family? Was their
relationship strained by sadness (or something else)? We may never know. We do
know she kept up with her cousins in Salem,
the Kilsons, and that her son, my grandfather Louis, knew and told stories
about them to his children. But what about Samuel, Louis’s grandfather,
Katherine’s dad, and my great-great-grandfather? I’ve got a record request out –
if we’re lucky, we’ll learn more soon.
And hopefully his
story, though of course it inevitably ends, has a happier ending than that of
his wife Rose. May they both rest in peace.
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