Do not go gentle into that good night, Part 1 - Stories from the Family Tree

Genealogy, by its very nature, is a record of life – and death. Those of us who compile this stuff are interested in the where and the when and the how of our ancestors; we want to know dates and places and where the bodies are buried. We endlessly comb through the records, looking for missing pieces of the puzzle, and when we find something, we make a new entry in the database. It's the entries labeled Died: that have caught my attention recently, and some are quite compelling.

Since my family tree goes all  the way back to European immigrants, there are a lot of wars and military battles between then and now. Commonly, I find records that state "so-and-so died at Lexington," or Concord, or Bunker Hill. Others might cite Gettysburg, Shiloh, or Vicksburg. Still others New Orleans or York. More than one ancestor lost his (or her) scalp to Indians. I mentioned some of them here.

And of course, there are a great many "Died" dates between the periods of 1914 to 1918 and of 1939 to 1945. You met Virgil Starnes in “Born under a wandering star,” and his wife Marien in “The Moose Story.” Virgil and Marien had two sons, Arley and Jessie. Jessie died in Canada of unknown causes at age 18. A few years later, Arley joined the Canadian Air Force, and in 1942 was dispatched to England for duty with a bomber squadron.

Shortly after his arrival, Arley was assigned to a Hallifax Bomber crew and flew his first and last mission. The bomber crashed close to the small village of Palterton, Derbyshire. Three airmen, including Arley, perished. There is a small memorial in Palterton to honor the men who gave their lives, as well as the two local villagers who were seriously burned in a vain attempt to rescue them from the flaming wreckage.

Many deaths in the family record are the result of accidents; Bertha Starnes, one of the “inmates” in the orphanage in San Dimas (mentioned here), was killed in a motorcycle accident sometime in the 1930s.

John Russell Hall was struck and killed while jogging. Ten years earlier, his father, Dr. Thomas Russell Hall drowned while scuba diving in Possum Kingdom Lake. He was not the first in the family to drown, by the way.

Bad luck seems to run in the Hall family - a prominent line on my mother's side: R. L. Hall, A cousin once removed, died in a small plane crash near Cleburne while on company business. Nineteen years later his brother died in the same manner, outside of Jasper, Texas - again on a business trip in a company plane.

Loren Starnes, youngest brother of my grandmother, was killed at age 20 in a hunting accident. My grandmother said, "Him and a friend was out hunting one morning. His friend said he started to get in the car and he had the gun in his hand some way or 'nother and it slipped, or his foot slipped and the gun went off and shot him in the chest."

James Boyd, an early ancestor in my mother's line met a particularly gruesome fate when he was accidentally killed in his mill while it was in operation.

And Allen Stepp Boyd (there are a lot of Boyds in this tree as well) died in a construction accident – an explosion, no less- while working on the Panama Canal.

Burrough Todd, almost too distant to be called a relative at all, according to the family record did not want to go to school one day, but his parents insisted and put him on the school bus. On the way to school the bus was struck by a railroad train. All perished.

There are more untimely deaths; in part 2, I will focus on some relatives that met their fate at the end of a rope, or maliciously, at the hands of others. Not uncommon in the frontiers of America.