Doing Genealogy? Don't Forget History and Geography Too!

If you have been researching your family for a while, you have undoubtedly encountered tragedy. We often speak of the “good old days,” but the reality was that life was difficult and harsh, especially for pioneer families throughout the nineteenth century. It is especially important for genealogists to understand the conditions in which our ancestors lived, and to do so, we need to work not only with names, dates, and places, but with an understanding of history and geography.

As families migrated west and north, they created their own new spaces in unfamiliar territory. Not only were they displacing Native Americans from their ancestral lands as they moved en masse via horse and wagon, they were also disturbing predatory animals, encountering poisonous plants, and succumbing to a wide variety of illnesses without adequate medical care. 

Recent personal research into a pioneer family in Greene County, Illinois, brought some of the sorrows and stoicism of our pioneer ancestors to light. The sheer number of deaths of young members of this family led this researcher to wondering why so many were stricken at such young ages, and that led to delving into the history and geography of Greene County for some explanations.

Greene County (shown in red on the public domain map on the right) is a bit northeast of St. Louis with its western border on the Illinois River. Today it measures about 540 square miles, and it is surrounded by Calhoun, Jersey, Pike, Scott, Morgan, and Macoupin Counties. Apple Creek, flowing into the Illinois River, bisects much of the county.

The Allen family, among them Thomas, the father, and William, one of his sons, arrived in this area of Illinois around 1819 and settled on the banks of Apple Creek. The first generation cleared the land and established several towns; they married, had families, and lived relatively long lives. The next generation, with large families born in the 1820s and 30s, began to show signs of distress. Although three of the children lived into their eighties, two of William Allen’s daughters died as infants and two of his other children died in their twenties. And in the next generations, the death rate for children continued to climb.

William Allen’s sister Elizabeth and her husband Francis Bell had nine children, one of whom was John Jefferson Bell. John and his wife Emaline Morrow had five children; only one lived past his twenties and he came to a sad end. Oldest son, Harvey, his wife Margaret, and two infant boys all died within a year of each other. Harvey was just twenty-eight, Margaret twenty-four, and the boys were less than a year old. John Bell’s youngest daughter, Sarah, was married and had a baby at the age of nineteen. The baby lived eight months; Sarah died a month later. And then there was John's son, Finis Ewing Bell, who lost a daughter when she was a year and a half and then his wife, who died two years later at the age of twenty-seven. Finis died at the age of forty-eight of an accident on his farm, when he slipped and fell under a moving piece of heavy equipment. So barring the odd accident, what could be the cause of so many of these young people dying?

(Photo above: John Jefferson Bell, from Past and Present of Greene County, Illinois, 1905. In public domain.)

Geography lesson over; history lesson needed . . .

Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, after the Civil War, the population of this part of Illinois began to increase, putting more people in close proximity than ever before. The land along Apple Creek where many of them lived flooded regularly. Much of the public domain land that this family and many others had purchased was swampy and was sold cheaply so it could be drained and cultivated. What did that mean to the survival of the pioneer families?

History and science tell us that many of the diseases that became epidemic during this era are caused by water-borne bacteria and insects, like mosquitoes, that breed in stagnant water. Top causes of death for this county during this time period were cholera (caused by contaminated drinking water), typhoid fever (caused by salmonella bacteria carried in water), and malaria (caused by mosquitoes). Infants died of diarrhea and pneumonia, and young adults also died of pneumonia and consumption (tuberculosis). All of these illnesses are especially aggressive where people are living in crowded households without adequate knowledge of what causes disease or proper sanitation. Young women very often died of infections after childbirth as they were attended by midwives, and occasionally doctors, who traveled from home to home lacking our modern understanding for keeping the birth environment clean and sterile. 

If you are researching Missouri or Illinois ancestors during the nineteenth century, you may want to check out some websites online that may help to explain why we see so many young lives lost during this time period. Other states likely have similar books to the ones on Missouri and Illinois, which you can find if you do a Google search for them.

David Davis, MD, Ph.D., editor, History of Medical Practice in Illinois, volume II, 1850–1900 (Chicago: Illinois State Medical Society) 1955. https://libsysdigi.library.uiuc.edu/OCA/Books2009-06/historyofmedical/historyofmedical02illi/historyofmedical02illi.pdf

E. J. Goodwin, A History of Medicine in Missouri (St. Louis: W. L. Smith Co.) 1905. https://archive.org/details/historyofmedicin00good

“Exploring Illness Across Time and Place,” Early 19th c. America https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~rogert/19wv.html

And be sure to register for the StLGS virtual monthly meeting for Saturday, 13 March 2021, when research librarian Ellen Mays will talk about "Historical Context and Social History." StLGS monthly meetings are always free and open to everyone. You can sign up on the StLGS website.