A Near Run In With Confederates and a "Spanish" Virus

William Hix Wells, Maud Orinda Wemple and five of their eight children

I have begun to turn my focus onto my 2nd great grandparents in my quest to write up a set of notes on my ancestors with the sum total of my research. Above are two of my 2nd great grandparents with my great grandmother Dorothy, sitting on William lap on the left and three of her older sisters and younger brother. This picture was taken probably 1906 when the young boy, Myron was born earlier that January. In the process of doing notes, one of my first steps is to look up an obituary if possible and indeed I found one for my great great grandmother Maud. As I was reading through it, I was shocked to see that she was a member of the Daughter's of the Confederacy.

Older readers will know that I have sought out Confederate ancestors to see if there were any slave holders among them but to day, I have found not a single one though I have identified one family that moved from the Virginia area right at the start of the Civil War. But this one took me by surprise, since Maud's own father, John Wemple, was a Civil War veteran for the Union Army and in fact, died from his injuries about 10 years after the war according to family lore. Maud's mother's family came from Ohio as far as I can trace them thus far and thus were unlikely to have supported the Confederate cause. I was stumped by this mention but took it on faith, at least until I found a second obituary written by another of Maud's seven daughters.

Assuming you can enlarge it enough to read, it states that she was a member of the "Elizabeth Blackwell Tent of the Daughters of the Union Veterans." This sounds a lot more plausible to me so I'm guessing whomever wrote the first obituary, which came out a week earlier the day after Maud's death, in a different town and newspaper, was doing a rush job and didn't proof or fact check the obituary. So for now, I'm still from solid Union stock with no rebels in my bloodline. 

Another article I turned up when researching digitized newspapers reminded me of how history is cyclic. I have read quite a bit about the "Spanish" flu pandemic of 1918 and seen many a grave of ancestors over the years with a 1918 final date so I knew it had affected my ancestors, but I have never heard about a single story relating to it until I found this article dated 25 Nov 1918. What especially tickled my funny bone was the arguing over the wearing of masks and groups of our population vowing to defy orders to wear masks. Sound familiar?

Not shown in this post but is another shorter article talking about how Maud and seven of her children had been removed from the family home and placed in quarantine for the flu. Since she had eight children, I don't know which child had the stronger immune system and wasn't affected. Nor was anything ever mentioned about her husband and my 2nd great grandfather William. But I do know that despite the pandemic killing 25% of the population of the United States, all eight children were still alive at the time of Maud's death in 1958 and were still alive well into their sixties when oldest daughter typed out a 20+ page of their family history, of which I have a copy.