As regular readers of the scrapblog know, whenever we're not just horsing around, we're all about showing how personal history is inextricably linked to broader history. The arrival of a new flu pandemic offers an opportunity to show a prime example. We're using a photo of cousin Noah by the World War I memorial near our Robbinsdale, Minn., home to illustrate the story. Noah, and all your beloved Miller cousins (yes, that includes CMill!CMill!), would not be here if it weren't for the great scourge that came hard on the heels of WWI, the Great Influenza.
Military travel helped spread this deadly strain, which killed tens of millions of people around the globe, including one Charles Norman Martin from Winston-Salem, N.C. Charles Martin was the husband of
Mamie Louella Jackson, the scrapblog editor's grandmother and mother of Uncle Bill (William Alton Miller). Five years after her first husband died of the flu on Nov. 4, 1918, the young widow remarried, this time to
Clyde Clifton Miller, grandfather of the Miller cousins and great-grandfather to their kids.
Charles' death must have been a great sorrow to Mamie and his little daughter Norma (our beloved
Aunt Norma, now in her 90s), but had it not have happened, twins William/Brother and Arlene/Cissie and their kid sister Marilyn, Millers all, would not have been born. That, spookily enough, is how history works. To read more about the Miller side of the family, go to
our Miller family scrapblog.
The scrapblog editor highly recommends the two spellbinding, bone-chilling books pictured above if you're interested in how pandemics, including the one at hand right now, work. "Flu" is by Gina Kolata, science reporter for the New York Times; "The Great Influenza" is by John Barry, an author and historian. The scrapblog editor owns both books if you want to borrow them.
As regular readers of the scrapblog know, whenever we're not just horsing around, we're all about showing how personal history is inextricably linked to broader history. The arrival of a new flu pandemic offers an opportunity to show a prime example. We're using a photo of cousin Noah by the World War I memorial near our Robbinsdale, Minn., home to illustrate the story. Noah, and all your beloved Miller cousins (yes, that includes CMill!CMill!), would not be here if it weren't for the great scourge that came hard on the heels of WWI, the Great Influenza.
Military travel helped spread this deadly strain, which killed tens of millions of people around the globe, including one Charles Norman Martin from Winston-Salem, N.C. Charles Martin was the husband of Mamie Louella Jackson, the scrapblog editor's grandmother and mother of Uncle Bill (William Alton Miller). Five years after her first husband died of the flu on Nov. 4, 1918, the young widow remarried, this time to Clyde Clifton Miller, grandfather of the Miller cousins and great-grandfather to their kids.
Charles' death must have been a great sorrow to Mamie and his little daughter Norma (our beloved Aunt Norma, now in her 90s), but had it not have happened, twins William/Brother and Arlene/Cissie and their kid sister Marilyn, Millers all, would not have been born. That, spookily enough, is how history works. To read more about the Miller side of the family, go to our Miller family scrapblog.
The scrapblog editor highly recommends the two spellbinding, bone-chilling books pictured above if you're interested in how pandemics, including the one at hand right now, work. "Flu" is by Gina Kolata, science reporter for the New York Times; "The Great Influenza" is by John Barry, an author and historian. The scrapblog editor owns both books if you want to borrow them.
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