Madgie McBrayer, 1898-1918

[dee_burris]

There are only the two photos in my collection of Madgie. In each, she is shown with one or both of her children.

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Madgie had a twin sister, Maggie. They were one of three sets of twins in their extended McBrayer/Herrington family, and older half sisters of my grandmother, Addie Louise Herrington.

I don't know which sister was born first, but they arrived on a hot summer day in late July 1898 in Clark County, daughters of Julia Ann Callaway and Robert Bruce McBrayer.

Maggie died in 1965. Madgie barely made it out of her teens.

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Madgie McBrayer married Homer Buck on 10 Jul 1913, just a couple of weeks short of her 15th birthday.

I don't know the names of either of Madgie's children, the youngest of whom died in 1918 also, and whose gravestone in DeGray Cemetery simply says "Baby Buck."



Madgie's stone was equally simple.



Her obituary appeared in the Southern Standard on 24 Oct 1918.

Mrs. Homer Buck died at her home in this city on Wednesday night of last week with pneumonia. The deceased was 20 years of age and leaves a husband and two children, besides father, mother, three sisters and three brothers. Funeral services were held Tuesday afternoon and the remains were buried at DeGray Cemetery.

Madgie McBrayer died on 17 Oct 1918.

Comments

[sttatus-quo.livejournal.com]

The timing would make it right for the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918. Three pregnancies by 20 would certainly have worn her down.

[oakmouse]

I was wondering about the Spanish Flu myself. I know it hit the Midwest and central South very hard, killing plenty of healthy young people, and October is long enough after it got started to make me wonder if pneumonia is the right diagnosis.

[sttatus-quo.livejournal.com]

I don't know that they recognized viral illness as well in those days. Flu often leads to pneumonia due to secondary bacterial/viral infection.

[oakmouse]

*nods* It does indeed, and in any case the symptoms of the Spanish Flu were similar to those of pneumonia --- it's just that the lack of oxygen was related to the bloodstream in that case, not the lungs as in pneumonia, and they didn't know that at the time. Virology was really in its infancy in 1918, and it was decades before Spanish Flu began to be understood.