17-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Tuesday, November 19, 1912: Poor little Jimmie got sick last night and had to miss his first day of school.
Jimmie Muffly
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Poor Jimmie— He was Grandma’s 7-year-old brother. It’s no fun to be sick—especially when you’re little. I wonder what was wrong. It sounds like whatever it was came on suddenly. I’m leaning towards him having the stomach flu.
And, poor Grandma’s mother—
Grandma had written in her diary the previous day:
. . . I was afraid I’d have to miss school when Pa had his threshing done. They started today . . .
November 18, 1912
This suggest that the threshers were still there. Grandma’s mother was probably trying to prepare food and serve it to a threshing crew—while also taking care of a sick (vomiting?) child.
Filed under: Other Tagged: | diary, family history, genealogy
as if she would not be busy enough- but our kids come first!
You’re so right–our kids come first!
I think it was a sore throat with no vomiting involved and he slept most of the day because of his fever.
Works for me. . definitely a fever.
might have been more worried back then when your kids got sick. They didn’t really have shelves and shelves of medication at the corner store.
It must have been so much scarier back then when so many more people got really sick or died from infectious diseases.
It sounds like life was busy for the Muffly family that day. Hope your grandmother managed to stay well.
She (and everyone in her family) seemed to get more little ailments than my family gets now–but maybe we’re just lucky.
[...] mother. Maybe she caught whatever ailment her little brother Jimmie had the previous week. On November 19 Grandma [...]
[...] been a rough November in the Muffly family. Her little brother Jimmie missed school on November 19 because he was sick; then her mother was sick—and now it sounds like Grandma may have caught the [...]
[...] November 19 [...]