Today, I had the chance to work on my own genealogy, and had my 10-year-old daughter Leah help me. She loves typing on a computer, and we've had some fun doing genealogy in the past, so she was excited to help me today. We started looking at the siblings of my 3rd-great-grandmother, Amelia (Waechter) Beilstein, who was born in Ohio in 1854. I saw that I didn't have much information on the family of Amelia's oldest brother, William Henry Waechter, so we started looking for info on his wife and their kids. We saw that William and his wife Annie (Schwartz) Beilstein had four children total, all born before 1900. One of those children didn't live to see 1900, but because he or she died before Pennsylvania started requiring birth and death certificates, I don't know if I'll be able to identify that fourth little one. That is especially sad to me, as I am the father of four children, and my fourth child, Levi, passed away at the age of two months. I would be devastated at the though of his memory being lost. But my grandpa's uncle John Henry Gibson (whose identity took me years to uncover because he likely died young as well) was finally identified several years after I first learned of his existence. So maybe someday I'll find this little cousin one day too.
Leah and I started looking up William and Annie's grandchildren, and found their oldest child Edna (Waechter) Holmes had three kids. I showed Leah how to add them to the database, and she had fun putting them in. It's so fun to see her get into it! While finding Edna's kids, we stumbled across her brother Russell's family, and found that he and his wife Annie (Deist) Waechter also had three kids. We had to break to get some lunch, and get things done around the home, and then I got back to genealogy later in the day. I decided to find the family of William and Annie's middle child, Florence Waechter. It turns out she and her older sister Edna got married at about the same time. However, Florence and her husband, Albert Feil, went on to have 12 children - twice as many as both her siblings put together! I wonder why they chose to have so many - was it a conscious choice, or did it just happen that way?
However, one thing stood out about Florence and Albert's children - they lost a little boy, their fourth child. His name was Kenneth Russell Feil, and he was born 28 May 1917. Exactly three months later, on 28 August 1917, he died of "cholera infantum," with asthma contributing to his death.
My heart just went out to Florence and Albert. They had lost their fourth child, like Florence's parents had lost one of their four children, like I lost my fourth child. But while William and Annie didn't have any more kids, Florence went on to become a mother eight more times.That staggers me. Putting herself out there, her very heart out there, more than half a dozen more times shows so much strength and fortitude to me. Maybe it was the times they lived in - one of the censuses for William and Annie had 8 or 9 families on the same page, and all but two had lost at least one child (one family lost both of the two they'd had). We tend to think of infant loss as something rare in our day and age, thanks to modern advances in medicine and technology. I found out when Levi passed away, that child loss is still very much a thing today. We may not lose them for the same reasons, but we do still lose them. My own son's cause of death was bronchopneumonia (though his regular physician felt it might have been SIDS). These things just happen, and they still happen.
Anyways, I couldn't find anything for the cemetery where the death certificate said he was buried. The name was Swartz Cemetery in Mars, Pennsylvania. The name Swartz makes me wonder if it was connected to the family of his grandmother, Annie (Schwartz) Waechter. I did some quick searching, but couldn't find a cemetery record for him anywhere. I hope he has a stone somewhere. I checked Ancestry, and there are a few family trees that have Kenneth in them. That made me smile - his memory has not been lost. Even without a stone, his memory is alive in the genealogy world and that is wonderful.
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