CORONA VIRUS PANDEMICS - DEATH RECORDS - GENEALOGY

Do you think you could stay at home for two weeks - possibly be alone the entire time - and keep busy?

I think I could.

I need time to organize my household, go through my closets, ready things for donation.

I can imagine catching up on my reading, watching movies I haven't yet, trying recipes I've been meaning to make. Writing letters or calling old friends I haven't had contact with in a while.  And of course there's always genealogy research and family history writing to continue.

Maybe you're sequestering yourself at the moment, or just staying home and out of crowds more than usual, and maybe you're reading this blog - ANCESTRY WORSHIP - GENEALOGY Blogspot to occupy your time.

I've been thinking about the term PANDEMIC and how diseases effected whole populations.  Like maybe all of you, my ancestors/ family have died of:

Tuberculosis

Cholera

Typhus 

The flu - as recently as 1955 and 1963 (Seeing the death records reminds me that taking the flu shot is a good idea.)

And perhaps most frightening - Small Pox.  As I understand it, you could catch it and go through horrible symptoms such as so much vomiting that you became completely dehydrated, resulting in organ failure.  There were also hideous weeping sores that left survivors with scars. A husband could give it to his wife who was nursing a newborn and all three would be dead in days.  A  feminine survivor in, say, colonial Philadelphia, might use pink colored wax - that contained led - to fill in the scars and give herself a smooth complexion.

I've seen the epidemics or pandemics in church records especially, when whole rows of people, young and old,  related or not, have the same reason for death listed. One after another.

An epidemic becomes a PANDEMIC when it effects a whole country or the world.

Pandemics have weened some DNA from populations.  There's some evidence that those who were more resistant may have even had changes in their DNA that they could pass on.  For instance the Black Death required thousands of burials and in those days before modern sanitation every opportunity to catch it and yet some survived.

The Black Death did something else to Europe.  People discarded class considerations in order to re-partner as a matter of survival.

And as there was more superstition than science at that point, people did not understand the role of filth.

I'm sure you are all listening to the news, watching YouTube videos, reading newspapers and on-line articles with the latest on this Wuhan Coronavirus.  Mixed in there is some speculation, some fake news (in both suggesting there is no problem and suggesting it's totally out of control.)

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VIKINGS BROUGHT ONE FORM OF LEPROSY TO IRELAND

Wow!  Vikings who brought Slaves to Ireland from Scandinavia may have also brought a form of   LEPROSY!  Skeletons tested revealed two forms of the disease.

IRISH CENTRAL - VIKING TO IRELAND and LEPROSY

EXCERPT: Professor Eileen Murphy from the School of Natural and Built Environment at Queen's University Belfast said: "Ireland is of particular interest in the history of leprosy as it was never part of the Roman world, nor underwent any significant occupation by later Anglo-Saxon settlers."

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU PRAY FOR - YOU MIGHT JUST GET IT : BOOK EXCERPT

LARRY DOSSEY : BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU PRAY FOR - YOU MIGHT JUST GET IT : BOOK EXCERPT 

If you've seen the death records of your ancestors a generation or more back, you know that many diseases than have since been "conquered" took our people out of this life. One of the most common diseases that killed people was TUBERCULOSIS and it's to blame for more than one of my ancestor's death.

Here is what author of BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU PRAY FOR, Larry Dossey, has to say:

"Consider the history of tuberculosis, one of the great scourges of humanity. As biologist Lyall Watson notes, skeletal evidence for tuberculosis has been found in graves in Germany dating back two thousand years and in Egypt's Old Kingdom. Engravings from 2500 B.C.E. show spinal deformities that, along with hieroglyphics descriptions provide clear descriptions of death from tuberculosis. The disease was common in ancient China, India, and Greece, where it was described by Hippocrates five centuries before Christ...

As cities grew larger and people moved about more freely, tuberculosis became pandemic. Waves of the "White plague" spread across the world, devastating cities in its wake, competing with the "black death" in ferocity. The last and greatest European epidemic began in England during the sixteenth century and peaked in London around 1750. The capital cities of western Europe were affected in turn though 1870. Then, Watson states, "There was a sudden, marked, and inexplicable decline in TB everywhere that records have been kept - beginning, it seems, in Germany in 1882... WHY?... Surgical interventions in tuberculosis did not begin until 1912, and antibiotic therapy in this illness was unknown until 1944. "But something did happen in Germany in 1882 that could be very significant," Watson observes - the discover by Dr. Robert Koch of the cause of tuberculosis, MYCOBACTERIUM TUBERCUILOSIS. Almost overnight physicians and researchers could actually see the organism for themselves, and common citizens could visualise it from illustrations."

"Almost immediately," Watson states, "There was a marked decrease, not only in the incidence of the disease, but also in its mortality. Deaths fell from 600 per 100,000 to around 200 in less than a decade... The recent improvements can all be attributed to better medical care, but nothing comparable happened to account for the sudden and rapid decline which is evident in Hamburg and Berlin during the 1880's. Nothing, that is, except Koch's discover and spreading awareness of what lay behind the disease that had come to be called "Captain of all the Men of Death."

pages 120-121 from BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU PRAY FOR - YOU MIGHT JUST GET IT

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