Pandemic of 1918

   In week three of the President's  "guidelines" and week two of the county's "Stay at Home" order what is a genealogist to do? I decided to see how my ancestors were impacted by the other great pandemic. 
   First of all, I have a first hand account of what my grandfather experienced.  He was in the Army stationed in Vermont while undergoing Signal Corps training.  He writes:

"It was the first of October I got a Special Delivery letter from Dr. Peter Berns stating that if I wanted to see my Grandmother Tendick alive I would have to come home at once. I took the letter to the Commandant and he informed me we were scheduled to leave soon but he did give me a 72 hour leave – If I made all connections on time, I would have but 6 hours after arriving at Terre Haute until I had to catch a return train there. I decided to try it, caught a train at 11 pm at Burlington and before the train pulled out an orderly was calling my name out. The commandant decided to give me 24 hours longer leave. Spent most of my leave with my grandmother and Mom of course. The stay was short and Grandmother died before I got back to camp.

On arrival back at camp the Flu had invaded it. They used our floor for an emergency hospital. I saw several of my buddies die. After about a week I took it too. It got to be a problem to handle the sick. I was taken to an emergency hospital set up in the basement of a Methodist Church. Evidently we had good care there for all 24 of us survived. The latter part of October we got orders to be shipped to the Signal Corp Embarkation Camp – Camp Alfred Vail, Little Silver, N.J. so we got our last look at Mount Mansfield and The Camels Hump already covered with snow, at beautiful Lake Champlain and Plattsburg, N.J. direct across the lake and far to southwest, Fort Ticonderoga."

  He didn't go into a lot of detail, but it did show how quickly the flue had spread through the camp. He had been gone just four days and returned to camp full of flu victims. And since they were using his floor as a ward, he also caught it. Luckily within a couple of weeks he was well enough to be shipped to New Jersey.

Burlington Daily News,
01 October 1918, page 2
Burlington, VT

Alfred W. Moehlmann, Oct 1918, Linton, IN
Home on leave
from Moehlmann Family Collection

Burlington Free Press,  07 Oct 1918, pg 8
Burlington, Vermont

There were 20 men with influenza in the first article and six days later there were 126.  Here is the paragraph from the above article about the service men:

" There are now 126 men under treatment at the Mechanic' and Signal Corps' schools according to the report given out by the university authorities yesterday. During the last two days there have been nine new cases of pneumonia, eleven Saturday and five yesterday. There have been three deaths bringing the total up to eleven."

 This is the only direct ancestor that I found that contracted the Spanish influenza. However, there were many cousins. The next posting will be about a cousin of Alfred's.