[Tarheel]

Indeed it seems that the death of young mothers left a devastating situation— children with only Dad left to be the parent and the breadwinner. The 1918 flu was tough on pregnant women also.

My grandfather had it—lived but was later killed in a mining accident. My grandmother said you would wrap your dead in a sheet with their name attached, put the body out at the garden gate and the undertakers made the rounds a couple of times a day to pick up the deceased.

My grandmother lost one toddler to the flu—but her husband survived the flu.

[stayathomemom]

I asked my mother if she had heard anything about the flu. She was about one year old when the worst wave of it went through. Apparently her father had gotten sick but survived. He was a minister and it was the only time he missed preaching until he was quite elderly. (He died at the age of ninety.) I keep hoping to ask an elderly woman at church what she recalls about it. I know that she had some older stepsisters and wonder if her family situation was caused by the flu.