Catch Up...

I've been meaning to post for days.My cough, congestion and tiredness have returned with a vengeance. Not sure why but I'm beginning to feel like a cold magnet. 

There was the hurricane, a birthday party, a trip to the dentist, grocery shopping and lunch out with an interfaith women's group before any new symptoms asserted themselves. My massage therapist and several others have also been sick.

Coughing seems to trigger my gag reflex, never a pleasant experience. 

Aside from this, my genealogy interest led me to a mystery which will likely never be solved. The man who would have been my paternal grandfather died at age 22, leaving a younger widow and baby. When asked, my mother said that he had died in a drunken car crash, a story told to her by her first husband. The same story was shared with his second wife and another of his children and I'm assuming the third wife and the remaining children as well.

Interestingly, however, upon sharing information about my lineage with the historical society in another state, the president of the organization is a distant cousin and shared two stories he had heard from family members about this death, neither of which has anything to do with a car crash.

The first involves family members, a dispute about stolen cattle and a shooting while the next concerns a self-inflicted gunshot during a family card game. I don't mind telling you that I found these accounts disturbing on a number of fronts. Who wants to be part of a family in which members shoot each other? Additionally, coming from a well known family in a small community, why would a suicide be any less scandalous than possible murder?

Neither the death certificate nor the obituary hint at either scenario. The certificate, signed by his brother who reported the death, a doctor, an undertaker and a clerk, states the cause as coronary occlusion which is basically either a clot or atherosclerosis. Acute indigestion is also mentioned. No autopsy notes are included and people during that era were under no mandate to even get a death certificate. Nor was there much known about heart problems eighty years ago.

Was there a cover up?

Only the dead know...