In a message dated 6/13/2008 8:54:22 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, [email protected] writes: I found this listing, but nothing for that specific time period I know that in the south the years and decades following the end of the Civil War was devastating. The elderly and the children and the newborns had a difficult time surviving. My great great grandfathers were not doctors or pharmacists but they were educated and when they moved to the hills in Arkansas, they carried books with them that enabled them to doctor and prepare medication. My grandmother gathered herbs and roots for them. The north had a growing immigrant population from the turmoil in Europe in that period. Many immigrants carried the Old World diseases with them. Sanitation in the larger cities was almost non-existent. The rural areas depended mainly on "natural" sanitation, bury the garbage or feed it to the hogs in the back yard or the chickens close by, lime the outhouses, rain to wash away waste. We washed the jars in hot soapy water to preserve food, but we used the boiling method, not the pressure method. Some women would "sample" the canned food before trusting it to her family. Others didn't and some died from botulism. We mustn't forget that trains with their dirty smoke ran in Westmoreland Co. at that time. My father had black lung disease, and I, a child who lived next to the track in a coal mining town for 10 years have had lung problems, probably black lung, the doctors say. My stepmother told of the time her mother deliberately sold a cow she knew had TB before the symptoms were noticeable. That meat was sold to the public. Along with the milk prior to butchering. Her daughter said she felt shame for what her mother did to other people, but her mother, an immigrant, said they did it in the Old Country. My grandmother in Indian Territory lost 3 of her 6 children to diphtheria from the "sweetest water in the world." She sold that water to others without wells.. I've read a dozen or more civil war pension applications and many of the ailments may have been contracted in the south and carried north or may just as likely have been fostered in the north. Parasites were in both places. I know for a fact some outhouses were built uphill from the homes. Lime was used, but the ground water would have been contaminated. I can still see the outdoor pump in line with the outhouse 30 or so feet above it. My father contracted malaria from a nephew who returned from the Asian theater with raging fevers (to the point of losing his memory for several months) some years after he was supposedly cured of it. This nephew died within the last 10 years complaining of "worms crawling out of the pores of his face." He would awaken and find tiny white strings on his pillow. He carried something back with him from the islands that incubated for decades. So it wouldn't have taken a world or even a local epidemic to have killed a lot of people in a certain decade. Well water contaminated in one neighborhood, not in another. Doctors unable to diagnose the new symptoms or not have the right medicine. Proximity of ill people and lack of sanitation. Contamination from new places and new diseases, many without the immunity that a lifetime exposure would have helped fight. We have to add air contamination now. The separate fires in the swamps in North Carolina and in the Dismal Swamp in Virginia have activated my allergy to wood fire smoke. Many have been warned to stay indoors under air conditioners, the elderly, children, heart patients, and those with asthma. It's just in my lifetime that polio has been controlled. Our parents were terrified of it for us. One of my friends did get it. My children were born just as the vaccine was found (a second stepmother, a nurse, was a guinea pig for Dr. Salk and did get a mild form of polio). But we do have increased environmental issues, poor sanitation in the foods we import, proximity to people, ability to travel to other places and carry our germs with us and pick up others' germs, acid rain, new viruses.. Don't particularly look for a large epidemic (other than the Spanish Flu) to explain a several deaths in a family or neighborhood. It could have been something as simple as a well gone bad or a woods on fire or eating spoiled food. Shirley Maynard Hampton, VA **************Vote for your city's best dining and nightlife. City's Best 2008. (http://citysbest.aol.com?ncid=aolacg00050000000102)