Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 14: Deadly Hail Storms

My cousin Donald told me the story of how his family came to live in, and then move from Canada in the 1930s. My grandparents had immigrated in 1928 and established a farm near the town of Irricana, Alberta. My Uncle Randall came along initially to help them get settled. He returned to Oregon but decided later to come back to Canada and farm on his own.

Donald was born in the Irricana area in 1932. Uncle Randall leased land in the Crossfield area north of Calgary and set out to become fully Canadian. Unfortunately, in the summer of his first year a hail storm, not uncommon in that region, destroyed his entire crop. My uncle decided there and then that farming in Alberta was not for him and he moved his family back to the United States.

This is really just a minor incident, both in terms of the region in which it occurred and in the history of our family but it had profound effect on the people involved as well as impacting future generations of people. Donald ended up growing up and making his life in a country he was not born into.

But it got me thinking about other members of our family who migrated to far off places during their lifetimes. And others, as well, in similar circumstances. Were they forced away from their homes because of changes in natural conditions under which they lived and worked. In particular, did a major, or even minor storm disrupt families to the point that they had to changed their way of life or move.

Major storms can disrupt activities, impact livelihoods and even kill people. It’s not always the excessive rain that is the sole problem. Often, it’s the other elements that come along with storms, such as tornadoes, floods and hail. Just do a Google search for hail storms and you will come up with thousands of hits, most of which will describe events in which very large hail stones thundered down on unsuspecting people, damaging cars and homes, reducing crops to bent straw and injuring people caught outside on what they thought was going to be a nice day.

Big storms containing hail commonly occur on hot spring or summer days when the heat causes evaporation from the Earth’s surface and carries the moisture up into the cold stratosphere. There the water vapour freezes and starts to fall. The continuous updraft lifts the ice pellets again where they acquire another coat of freezing water. The sequence can repeat several times resulting in vary large “stones” before they can escape the rising air and fall to earth.

In searching historical records, you will also find events similar to the 30 April 1888 storm that devastated the town of Moradabad in India. It struck at midday. Hail stones the size of oranges killed 230 people as well as thousands of farm animals that could not find protection. Strong winds accompanying the storm toppled many buildings.

“A single storm might produce unexpected results that can affect the outcome of a nation’s history. For example, on 13 April 1360, the army of King Edward III of England were marching against the French at Chartres when a violent hailstorm was unleashed on them. Hundreds of ill-protected men and horses died in the onslaught of hailstones reported to be as large as pigeon’s eggs. Lightning apparently also struck and killed knights in full battle armour. After this onslaught from Mother Nature, with his army in tatters after the onslaught from nature, Edward agreed to a truce under which he got a major portion of the country but was denied the French crown.” (from Shepheard, 2018: Surviving Mother Nature’s Tests, p. 111)

 

Source: Barnard, Bryn. (2003). Dangerous Planet: Natural disasters that changed history. New York: Crown Publishers.

National Geographic reported on an area called Roopkund Lake, also in India, in Uttarakhand state in the Himalayas. In 1942 skeletal remains of hundreds of people were found in the frozen water. For years, scientists and archaeologists debated what had killed them all. The final conclusion was that they had been caught in a terrible hail storm around 850 AD as they traversed the mountain range. All had been killed or stunned by round objects from above that fractured skulls, leaving them to die from their injuries or eventually from hypothermia in the high mountain valley. Those objects must have been very large hail stones.

In 1986, a hail storm killed 100 people and injured at least 9,000 in Sichuan province, in central China.

Golf ball and baseball size hail stones are not uncommon. Many readers may have seen such projectiles from the sky. The largest hail stone found so far measured 7 inches in diameter and fell during a storm on 22 June 2003 in Vivian, South Dakota.

Hail storms can cause significant damage if they happen in urban areas. Where I live, a hail storm on 7 September 1991 caused $342 million in insurable damage. Luckily that one missed out home but I do remember having to install a new roof in 1982 after hail stones pound shingles off the old one.

As I said, some storms have been only inconveniences. Others throughout history have been deadly. And perhaps more than a few, such as the one that took out my uncles crop in 1932, resulted in major changes to a family’s livelihood and history.

Surviving Mother Nature’s Tests: The effects climate change and other natural phenomena have had on the lives of our ancestors (with examples from the British Isles)

I have written a new book that combines my training and expertise in Earth science (geology) with my experiences and research in genealogy.

Surviving Mother Nature’s Tests relates many examples of situations observed in nature – primarily from the British Isles, but applicable everywhere – to the lives of families who experienced or endured them during the past several centuries. Descriptions of many types of natural phenomena are presented along with numerous references to publications in which readers may find much more information as to their origin and impact on people.

A constant underlying theme runs through many major environmental transformations, influencing the number, timing and magnitude of events – climate change. Over thousands of years, the ebbs and flows of global climate have resulted in patterns of weather that significantly affected food production, shelter and employment, and with that, living conditions and basic survival.

Information presented will be of interest to those who want an introduction to the causes and effects of climate change. Family historians will gain knowledge about how such processes significantly affected generations of people during the past several centuries.

As the title suggests, the book summarizes different natural phenomena, the time periods in which they occurred and explanations of how people survived the particular tests imposed on them by Mother Nature. Among the subjects treated are:

·         Climate Change – what controls global transformations

·         Epochal Changes – how gradual altering of physical environments and human habitats occurring over generations affected living conditions and societal history

·         The Holocene Epoch – brief summaries of human and natural history of the last 10,000 years illustrating the frequency of alternating warm and cold periods and the commonality of their effects on societies

·         The Last Millennium – natural conditions during the last 1,000 years with an emphasis on the effects on people, communities and social systems

·         Slow-Developing Events – how such events as drought and famine, erosion of coastal margins, infilling of estuaries, shifts in river courses and volcanic activity affected living conditions and economies

·         Rapidly-Materializing Incidents – impacts on people and communities from disease, earthquakes, floods and storms 

In almost any scenario one can imagine involving people and communities in the past, elements of the physical environment have significantly impacted living conditions. Some natural events, such as climate change, have played out over centuries; others, including major storms or floods, have caused damage and death in just hours. Many incidents concerning natural phenomena have altered lives and livelihoods, disrupted normal activities and, in many instances, forced people to change their way of life or move. In many cases people moved in order to participate in major clean-up and repair projects, a large number of them eventually settling in those new locations.

Social and political events were often connected to natural changes. Famine, resulting from various natural events, over time caused upheaval and unrest among people. The outcomes of wars have been affected by physical or climatological conditions on the battlefields. Migration of families, on a local scale and involving whole communities began when people could no longer feed themselves in areas devastated by changes to the environment.

Mother Nature has constantly been testing humans with a variety of natural phenomena. Studies of family history are not complete without consideration of the environs in which our ancestors lived. Mostly only strong and resourceful people – or in some cases, the luckiest ones – lasted through the many alterations of their physical surroundings.

Genealogists may find information about the environments in which their ancestors lived in a number of sources, including: parish and manorial records, newspapers, historical publications, archaeological studies and scientific articles and books. These reports and stories will add colour and background to family histories and assist in determining what impact natural events had on lives and livelihoods and the decisions people made with respect to their daily routines and long-term plans.

Surviving Mother Nature’s Tests is available from Unlock the Past and Gould Genealogy & History (Australia) in both print and PDF format.

Grandparents are supposed to be…

So…grandparents are supposed to be those patient, smiling, gray-haired people who run a farm, with horses that work for them or that you ride with in a carriage or wagon pulled by old Dobbin (there really was a Dobbin on the farm of my grandparents).

Grandparents are not supposed to be the ones who spend part of a Saturday at the local A&W, having lunch delivered by a girl on roller skates (apparently some places are bringing this service back); or working at a Dairy Queen making those cute little curly cues on top of a soft ice cream cone, then dipping them in chocolate (mmmm!).

Grandmothers bake cookies or make fried chicken dinners, after they “harvest” the chickens out in the back yard, of course, and bring in the fresh vegetables from the big garden by the creek.

Not ones who kids ride with on an ATV down a muddy lane.

In the evenings grandparents sit reading, knitting and listening to the radio.

They don’t exchange pictures and comments live on Skype or WeChat. And they don’t own iPhones and tablets!

They shop at the town general store and sometimes in the city at a department store. Or they might use the Eaton’s catalogue (Sears Roebuck in the USA) that is delivered to their mail box.

They don’t do Amazon!

It’s different now. We modern grandparents, of course, do all the stuff that our grandparents never dreamed of – much of it our parents never were exposed to, either. We are able to see our grandchildren in real time, no matter where they are. We can talk to and see them on their birthdays or when they participate in performances on the other side of the world, via a direct link through the Internet. (I posted about this subject last August: Family History in the making…and seen Live!). Or we can fly to visit with them in person in a matter of hours.

I was fortunate growing up in being able to know and visit with my grandparents. My wife’s parents immigrated to Canada on their own, so she never met her grandparents. In any case, they had all died in Scotland long before she was born. In these respects, we are a lot like my parents.

My father grew up knowing his maternal grandparents and paternal grandfather who lived in the same rural community of Keoma, Alberta. They were all part of a close-knit family. My mother never met her grandparents. Most of them had died before she was born. She was only eight years old and living in Oregon when her paternal grandfather died and I never heard any stories of her visiting him with her parents in Oklahoma.

We try to be a big part of our grandchildren’s lives because we want to be, we can be and we want them to know about us. We also try to share stories of their ancestors, from all branches, so that they will have some knowledge of where and who they came from.

Family history is a continual process with stories being added every day. In the future I hope our grandchildren will pass along their reminiscences about their grandparents to their grandchildren. We’ll be history by then!