Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 17: Glaciers & Ice Fields

This may sound like a strange genealogical topic as most of us do not live anywhere near glaciers, nor have we ever felt threatened by them. But the subject has come up in the news often in recent years as many sources point to the retreat of ice in mountain valley as signaling doom for the planet from global warming.

The retreat of glaciers is not unique to the modern period, though. It has happened during every warm period for tens of thousands of years, just as the formation of these great ice rivers took place during the many intervening cold epochs.

Think, for a moment about what it might have been like for one of your ancestors to have watched as a mountain of ice slowly advanced on their farms and houses, crushing and grinding up everything in its path. Or how they may have felt the cold winds as the glacier fronts crept closer. Ice-cold rivers, filled with debris, may have overrun their fields, destroying any potential for harvests.

During the Little Ice Age, beginning about 1300 AD, glaciers formed in almost every mountain range in the world. The greatest advances of glaciers since the last major ice age – 25,000 years ago – occurred in the last 400 years, culminating in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. That cold age, of which glaciers were a part of, brought misery and distress to most of the old world, so the idea of their existence is also an indication of a climate that was, at best, unfavourable for habitation.

By 1600, in the Alps at least, glaciers on all sides had reached their maximum position. Many church and other records from communities in that part of the continent contain information about the devastation caused by advancing glaciers: overrunning farms and villages; and destroying infrastructure that had been in use for hundreds of years. Pastures in the upper reaches of valleys became inaccessible and mountain passes were blocked. Animals and people were injured and even killed by rock and ice falls, and floods.

In 1616, an official arrived at the Argentière glacier tongue (near Chamonix, France) and reported: “. . . The great glacier of La Rosière every now and then goes bounding and thrashing or descending; for the last five or six years . . . it has been impossible to get any crops from the places it has covered . . . Behind the village of Les Rousier, by the impetuosity of a great and horrible glacier which is above and just adjoining the few houses that remain, there have been destroyed forty-three journaux (of land) with nothing but stones and little woods of small value, and also eight houses, seven barns, and five little granges have been entirely ruined and destroyed.” (Le Roy Ladurie, 1971, p148).

On more than one occasion, priests were summoned to perform blessings and offer prayers to God to halt the progress of glaciers that threatened communities with total destruction. They did not always work.

In Scandinavia, tax records show that relief was being granted farmers from the payment of taxes as a result of their fields being destroyed by landslides caused by ice movement and outwash of debris loosened by the glaciers and sent downstream by raging streams. Here, too, the lives of people and livestock were put in jeopardy, and even taken from time to time. Property damage was often severe, to the point that people had to abandon their homes and livelihoods.

One petition for tax relief from Olden Skipreide (Norway) in 1755 stated: “. . . when the freeholder was out fishing in the fjord, a great avalanche broke out from the mountain and not only swept all the farm buildings and carrel into the lake but also his wife, children and servants, eleven people in all and all of them being killed. . .” (Grove, 1988, p.81).

During the same time period, the ice pack of the North Atlantic shifted south, almost engulfing Iceland, Greenland and parts of Scandinavia. The ice restricted passage through the northern part of the ocean and limited access to ports, cutting off supplies of colonies. The fishing industry was decimated as fish stock, particularly cod, moved out of the increasingly cold waters, forcing fishermen to travel farther as well as change their target catches.

I recommend that genealogists investigate natural phenomena in any region in which their ancestors lived in order to determine whether such factors were important in day-to-day living or survival. For genealogists, the importance of glaciers is not where they are today, for example, things that interest tourists, but where they were during the Little Ice Age when your ancestors lived, as they are direct indicators of climatic conditions. For some they were part of everyday living and survival.

References:

Grove, Jean M. (1988). The Little Ice Age. London & New York: Routledge.

Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel. (1967). Histoire du Climat depuis l'an mil. Flammarion, Paris. (translated by Barbara Bray as Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000, Doubleday and Co., 1971).

Paupers’ Graves

The thing about paupers’ graves is that if one of your ancestors was buried in such a place you would probably never find out. For the most part those interred there were unknown, as well as being poor.

Some individuals will have been named, those that were known but whose surviving families, if there were any, did not have sufficient resources to pay for a funeral or burying fees.

Almost every municipality or ecclesiastical district, throughout centuries, has set aside places to bury those who could not be identified. During major epidemics in the middle ages, mass burials occurred of those who had succumbed to disease. Many did not have families left to mourn and remained unnamed. The burial grounds may not even have been marked. We are finding a few today in urban areas undergoing renewal.

Even today, cities and towns set aside plots for paupers or unknown people. You need only do a local search of cemeteries for pauper burials to find them. Occasionally news reports surface about old graveyards with paupers and unknown people buried in them. Here is a sample of news reports from recent years:

·         Tragedy of 100,000 buried in paupers’ graves over past five years – Vanessa Allen – Daily Mail 28 November 2011, London “At least 100,000 pensioners who died penniless and alone have been buried in paupers’ graves in the past five years, a charity revealed yesterday. . . Such paupers’ mass graves conjure an image of Dickensian poverty. But this has become the reality for some of the 40,000 people a year in Britain who receive state-funded funerals – of which about 21,000 are pensioners.”

·         Third world America: Bodies driven to a pauper's burial in a U-Haul as tough economic times lead to more mass graves – Daily Mail 19 January 2012 “The pauper's burial section at Homewood Memorial Gardens was established for those who could not afford to pay for a burial plot. And it is a problem that's sweeping America as tough economic times have led to an increase in the number of indigent burials the morgue must perform.”

·         Pauper’s burials give dignity to all – Douglas Todd – Vancouver Sun 1 March 2015 “In this careful-to-not-offend era, however, ‘pauper’s burials’ are now technically called ‘ministry burials.’ That’s because B.C.’s Social Development Ministry handles the transportation of the corpse, cremation and burial. A lack of money in the deceased’s estate is the most common reason the B.C. government, and sometimes the federal pension plan, comes up with the several thousand dollars necessary to make possible a ministry burial.”

·         New tribute to nearly 200 people buried in paupers’ grave… - Andrew Bardsley - Bolton News 12 January 2016, Greater Manchester “A new headstone has been organised, which features a message in tribute to those buried there. In addition, a book featuring the names of all of the 198 men, women and children to be buried at the site is being compiled.”

·         Everyone is entitled to a funeral – Jennifer Hough – National Post 19 October 2014 “Provinces are spending millions of dollars every year to give thousands of Canadians a final sendoff — because no one else can or will.”

·         Dying alone: Hundreds of bodies are going unclaimed in Ontario and Quebec – Leslie Young & Andrew Russell – Global News 22 February 2017 “According to a 2014 report from Ontario’s coroner, these individuals are mostly men and mostly older than 60.”

·         Perth’s Elmwood cemetery dedicates paupers section of graveyard – Desmond Devoy – Perth Courier 5 December 2016 Ottawa Valley “More than 400 people who are believed to have worked, and died, during their time at the old Perth House of Industry, from 1903 to 1965, and were buried in what was essentially a ‘pauper’s’ section of the Elmwood Cemetery, now finally have their own headstone.”

·         Funerals held each year for dozens of Calgarians who die alone – Monty Kruger – CBC News 28 May 2016 Calgary “They are the overlooked. The forgotten. The men and women here in Calgary who die unclaimed, whose passing goes all but unmarked. Sometimes we know their names, sometimes even that is a mystery.”

Those who died in workhouses and hospitals were often buried in unmarked graves. To the shame of some institutions, many children died while supposedly in their care and were ignominiously disposed of in mass graves, some without records to mark their passing or even their lives. Many were still-born babies of unwed mothers, shut away from public eyes in times when such conditions were scorned.

·         Names of five more children buried in paupers' graves found – Aoife Barry - The Journal 6 April 2017 Dublin

·         Memorial to Beverley Broadgate Hospital's paupers' graves unveiled – BBC News 6 October 2017 Humberside

There was probably an overlap between paupers’ and mass burial sites in centuries past when epidemics took hundreds of people in very short time periods. Many of them, such as plague victims in London in 1666, were also poor and ended up in burial pits. Some may have had their names written into parish registers, but thousands probably did not.

As an Online Parish Clerk, I have come across many burials of strangers or persons unknown who died while in the parish, or sailors found along a beach who died as a result of a shipwreck. The church took care of burying them but their names were never known.

Most genealogists use burial information as a prime source in assembling family history information. Without the final resting place known for their ancestors, the stories will always be incomplete.

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 16: Plague

People may be unaware of the fact that the Plague, that devasted Europe centuries ago, is still with us.

Yup! That PLAGUE!

Of course, we have come a long way in the recognition and treatment of the disease. There has not been a major outbreak since the 17^th century, at least ones that resulted in mass deaths. But it did affect the population of several European cities into the early 1800s.

Three pandemics of the disease are well described in articles about The History of Plague by John Frith:

·         First (Justinian) – “The first great pandemic of bubonic plague where people were recorded as suffering from the characteristic buboes and septicaemia was the Justinian Plague of 541 CE, named after Justinian I, the Roman emperor of the Byzantine Empire at the time. The epidemic originated in Ethiopia in Africa and spread to Pelusium in Egypt in 540. It then spread west to Alexandria and east to Gaza, Jerusalem and Antioch, then was carried on ships on the sea trading routes to both sides of the Mediterranean, arriving in Constantinople (now Istanbul) in the autumn of 541.”

·         Second (Black Death) – “In 1346 it was known in the European seaports that a plague epidemic was present in the East. In 1347 the plague was brought to the Crimea from Asia Minor by the Tartar armies of Khan Janibeg, who had laid siege to the town of Kaffa, a Genoese trading town on the shores of the Black Sea. . . In panic the Genoese traders fled in galleys with ‘sickness clinging to their bones’ to Constantinople and across the Mediterranean to Messina, Sicily, where the great pandemic of Europe started. By 1348 it had reached Marseille, Paris and Germany, then Spain, England and Norway in 1349, and eastern Europe in 1350.”

·         Third – “The plague re-emerged from its wild rodent reservoir in the remote Chinese province of Yunnan in 1855. From there the disease advanced along the tin and opium routes and reached the provincial capital of K’unming in 1866, the Gulf of Tonkin in 1867, and the Kwangtung province port of Pakhoi in 1882. In 1894 it had reached Canton and then spread to Hong Kong. It had spread to Bombay by 1896 and by 1900 had reached ports on every continent, carried by infected rats travelling the international trade routes on the new steamships.”

Since the beginning of the 20^th century, there have been occasional infection of individuals around the world, the latest reported in June 2018 of probable bubonic plague in an American teenager in Idaho.

The bacterium, Yersinia pestis, is hosted in rodents and spread by fleas that live on these hosts.

The generally accepted theory of how the disease develops expands and spreads is during periods of climate change, in particular in regions that are normally dry and that become wet through an increase in rainfall.

In nature, the bacteria live in wild rodents and in the soil of their habitat. In areas that are hot and dry, the populations of these animals are stable, as are the numbers of fleas that live on them. During the latter part of the 13^th century, in central Asia, the climatic conditions changed, bringing more rainfall over many years. The semi-arid habitat was transformed allowing the entire grassland ecosystem to grow. The rodent numbers – marmots, susliks and gerbils – exploded along with the accompanying pathogen-carriers, the fleas. There is a great summary of the history of the plague and its attack on Europe, beginning in the 14^th century, in The Great Transistion by Bruce M. S. Campbell (2016).

The wild rodents were eventually overpowered by the bacteria and began to die in large numbers, possibly aided by occasional droughts. That fostered the jump to other rodent and small mammal populations which had a wider range, including many that coexisted with humans. The infected rodents and their parasitic insects moved westward with the trade caravans. Eventually the domestic rats began to die off en masse and the infected fleas and lice transferred to humans. The result, with people interacting on a wide regional scale, was a pandemic that quickly spread across all of Europe.

The bacterium has mutated over the centuries, with different strains causing epidemics. Antibiotics now assist in the recovery of plague victims. Death tolls have been reduced from 50% of those affected to about 10%, or better if treatment is begun within 24 hours of diagnosis.

Plague bacteria still exist in many locations around the world, mainly in particularly warm and dry regions. The diagram below shows the Global Distribution of Plague

 

(A) Map showing countries with known presence of plague in wild reservoir species (red). For US only the mainland below 50° N is shown. (B) Annual number of human plague cases over different continents, reported to WHO in the period 1954–2005. (C) Cumulative number of countries that reported plague to WHO since 1954

In North America, plague cases have been restricted to the western regions. Plague was first seen in the US in 1900, introduced by rats from steamships that had arrive from affected areas in Asia. The last urban outbreak occurred in Los Angeles in 1924-25. Thirty people died during a two-week period (Viseltear, 1974).

Since the Los Angeles occurrence, isolated cases have been diagnosed, mostly in rural areas. Over 80% have been of the bubonic form. People of all ages have contracted the disease at the rate of about seven cases per year.

 

Reported cases of human plague in the United States between 1970 and 2016; one dot placed randomly in most likely county of exposure for each confirmed case (retrieved 21 August 2018 from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website) 

The modern world does not have much to fear from this disease anymore, but genealogists my find many of their ancestors were exposed to it, possibly succumbing as the survival rates were very low.

What is interesting is that it has never gone away!

References:

Campbell, Bruce. M. S. (2016). The Great Transition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Chodosh, S. (2018). Five things you might not know about the plague (not including the fact that it still exists). Popular Science website. 

Frith, John. (2012). The History of Plague – Part 1: The three great pandemics. Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health. 20(2).

Stenseth, N. C., B. B. Atshabar, M. Begon, S. R. Belmain, E. Bertherat, E. Carniel, K. L. Gage, H. Leirs & L. Rahalison. (2008). Plague: Past, Present, and Future. http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050003

Viseltear, A. J. (1974). Pneumonic Plague epidemic of 1924 in Los Angeles. Journal of Biology and Medicine. Volume 1, pp 40-54. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2595158/pdf/yjbm00152-0044.pdf

Plague (disease) – Wikipedia

Plague – World Health Organization