UPDATED w/newspaper clipping: The Childrens' Deaths

  

    One Century ago this Summer, in 1921, three children who would have been my paternal Aunt and Uncles died within days of one another....perhaps of unintentional poisoning.

 

30,000 flu deaths were reported in New York City that year, 

and by 1920 my Paternal Grandparents must have been

 counting their blessings to have survived with their six children. 

     But another deadly event was about to strike the family. 

My father was born in 1921, the same year three of his 

siblings---two brothers and a sister---died within days of each 

other.

 

 

One of my childhood memories is going to a cemetery

 in the Bronx to visit family graves. 

They are buried along with one of their siblings, my Uncle Tom and his wife Mary... 

 

Five year old James was the first to die, on Thursday, July 28. 

Twelve year old Kathleen was second on Monday, August 8th. 

And ten year old Andrew died on Thursday, August 11th.

 

  During my childhood visits to their shared grave, I was told 

they died because they ate something in a medicine cabinet. 

That may have been someone’s effort to make their deaths 

at least a lesson. 

They may have died from eating bad ice cream as indicated in the newspaper clipping,

 or candies at a neighbor’s party (although as far as I can tell, 

no other children became ill). 

It was a news story, of course, printed in the papers, 

including the New York Times. The story may have gotten 

even more publicity because their father, my grandfather, 

was a New York police officer. 

 

The stories quoted police as promising a thorough 

investigation, and autopsies were performed.

He and my Grandmother Sarah had other children as well, 

but when I think of Andrew and Sarah losing the three children 

one after another, I imagine they were almost expecting 

a fourth child to pass as well.

      That didn't happen, and the infant who would grow up to become my father had no memory of the deaths. The last of the children died in 2009, my Aunt Eileen, for whom I named this early cell-phone photo, taken in New York as I was traveling to her funeral.

Bridge Eileen