On Dogs and Ancestral Children
Yesterday when I went to leave home there was a dog roaming near the house, a very rare occurrence. I was about to open the garage door and remembered the past. Jessie was in the open doorway when a couple was walking their leashed dog on the road. Jessie took exception to its presence in front of her property, took off and attacked the dog. Her faithful friend, normally the gentlest creature, had to join in. Fortunately Jessie’s proprietary instinct was superior to her fighting technique and she was the one requiring a few stitches. Yesterday’s dog, a timid looking creature with some greyhound ancestry and a collar, disappeared when I walked towards it. I could leave safely without fear of an ancient protector engaging in a dog fight.
Jessie had a very unsettled night last night. She receives monthly injections for arthritis and has other medical conditions. She’s had the pointy end of the final injection hovering over her for over a year. However, she manages very well, at times initiates play with Phantom and enjoys throwing her toys, large soft drink bottles into the air and squashing them. I think she’s had an OK day and is currently looking comfortable on her double decker bed.
The “smash and grab” raid in the genealogy data bases continues although there’s been minimal recent grabs due to a combination of reduced numbers of relevant files and a certain amount of fishing in the dark among Irish ancestors. I’ve also been tidying the records I do have. I reexamined an Irish census return for a great grandmother’s sister and my jaw dropped for the second time when considering family size in some earlier generations.
The Irish sister reported bearing 10 live children with 6 alive, some quite young, at the time of the census. Can’t help but think of the wasted resources; emotional, social, financial, physical, time etc involved in being pregnant, bearing 10 kids and then
losing so many. It is interesting to consider the social, health and religious environment responsible for such results. I noticed that her 2 widowed sisters in NSW did not remarry in Catholic churches; one even marrying in the rectory rather than the church. We have much to be grateful for when living in a social and health environment, which despite its faults, is full of opportunity and choice.
My jaw first dropped when I discovered that an English born great grandmother had borne 12 children in Victoria, especially when we’d only ever known of one, our grandfather. She was having kids about 20 years earlier but in a far more comfortable housing and financial situation. However, she was unlucky enough to lose 4 of them during childhood. One died from diphtheria. Today we are routinely vaccinated against it along with several other infections which were common in previous times and nowadays are kept at bay by community vaccination. We have a photo of her as an elderly woman where she looks worn out and sad. She outlived her husband by around 35 years and also one of their children who had reached adulthood.
A Scottish great great grandmother lost a daughter and two of her grandchildren to a common infectious disease which few people know of these days. From what I remember of the records I think they had tried to spread the risk and perhaps share the load of care by sending one of the kids to live with his aunt but he still succumbed to the disease. While the great grandmother hadn’t lost any kids during childhood she’d previously lost 2 children to Victoria so the family had its share of loss. Luckily for her, the son in Victoria returned home after about 12 years, rejoined the family business, married and had 2 children.