Now I think the family carried cystic fibrosis. There is no confirmation of this. It is personal observation and the scant information of how the children died. Both were boys and were the only boys.
There are no other children from the family.
I wanted to dig into the background of the other members of the family, such as the Ingals. I met several of them now living in Iowa. Decided not to.
Any other researchers out there?
And...Today, with modern aggressive medicine, children with the serious disease of Cystic Fibrosis often live into adulthood.
Don’t forget Laura herself lost her only son when he was about 10 days old. So Ma, Laura, and Rose. I always wondered how Ma and Pa’s fortunes would have been different had Pa had someone to help him support the family.
“Now I think the family carried cystic fibrosis. There is no confirmation of this. It is personal observation and the scant information of how the children died. Both were boys and were the only boys.”
My mother was the youngest of 14 children (9 boys 5 girls), born in 1930. None of the boys lived beyond their first year of life. My mother remembered that the doctor told my grand mother that she’d “never raise a boy”. My sister, a nurse, had asked fellow health professionals what may have been the cause and why it affected only boys. She was never able to come up with any reasonable conclusion.
Almanzo got an illness - can’t remember what it was, been many years - after Rose was born, and afterwards had a limp. I think it rendered him sterile, didn’t say in the book. High fevers can do that to a man.
At the age of 15, Laura accepted her first teaching session, teaching three terms in one-room schools when not attending school herself in DeSmet. Laura later admitted that she did not particularly enjoy teaching, but felt the responsibility from a young age to help her family financially, and wage earning opportunities for females were limited. Laura stopped teaching when she married Almanzo on August 25, 1885. Almanzo had achieved a degree of prosperity on his homestead claim, due to favorable weather in the early 1880s, and the couple’s prospects seemed bright. She joined Almanzo in a new home on his tree claim north of DeSmet and agreed to help him make the claim succeed. On December 5, 1886, she gave birth to Rose Wilder (1886–1968) and later, an unnamed son, who died soon after birth in 1889.
The first few years of marriage held many trials. Complications from a life-threatening bout of diphtheria left Almanzo partially paralyzed. While he eventually regained nearly full use of his legs, he needed a cane to walk for the remainder of his life. This setback, among many others, began a series of disastrous events that included the death of their unnamed newborn son, the destruction of their home and barn by fire, and several years of severe drought that left them in debt, physically ill, and unable to earn a living from their 320 acres (1.3 km2) of prairie land. The tales of their trials farming can be found in The First Four Years, a manuscript that was discovered after Rose Wilder Lane’s death. It was published in 1971, and detailed the hard-fought first four years of marriage on the Dakota prairies.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/kids/dreamteam/laurawilder.html