Pandemic Genealogy
My grandfather, Henry Offord Tuell, almost survived the Spanish flu epidemic that swept the globe in 1918.
It was mid-October in Lindsay, Oklahoma, an agricultural community known for its broomcorn crop. Henry arose from his sick bed, got dressed and headed downtown to the barbershop for a long-overdue bath, shave and a haircut. But he ventured out in the crisp fall air a little too soon, according to my late father, Henry Offord Tuell II.
Like many who contracted that virus — not unlike the novel coronavirus that now assails us — the damage caused to his lungs led to pneumonia. In Henry’s case, it was the later that proved to be fatal.
He died on a Monday morning, Oct. 21, 1918. He was 27 years old.
“It is with genuine sorrow we chronicle the death of H.O. Tuell, one of Lindsay’s most energetic and worthy young businessmen,” read the obituary in the Lindsay News.
He was buried the following afternoon in nearby Erin Springs Cemetery in the burial plot of his wife’s family. The Rev. J.E. Couch conducted a graveside service.
“The floral offerings were profuse and beautiful,” read the Lindsay News.
Mazie, Henry’s wife and my paternal grandmother, also fell ill with the influenza. My great-grandmother, Virginia Frost, nursed Mazie through the flu as family friends cared for my father, who was not quite two years old. Mazie soon recovered from the flu. Recovery from her husband’s death would have taken much longer.
Henry and Mazie had married just two and a half years earlier, on March 12, 1916. She had worked at the phone company and he managed the men’s department at Perry Brothers Department Store. When they returned from their honeymoon in Oklahoma City, they were met at the train station by a crowd of friends and paraded down Main Street. Based on the hundreds of photos that remain from their short marriage, they were madly in love. Their photos reflect that playfulness of young lovers — they staged pictures standing on a nearly submerged rock in the Washita River, sitting in an old wagon costumed in western outfits, perched in upper branches of trees.
These photos are a symphony of love, of youthful silliness, of exuberant joy — music that was silenced by a flu pandemic in 1918.
Three generations of my relatives are buried near Henry in Erin Springs Cemetery and in the town cemetery of nearby Bradley, Oklahoma. Both were frontier communities in Indian Territory where my ancestors settled. Wandering among the headstones, some dating back nearly two centuries, Kathy and I have noticed so many that list date of death as 1918.
Because of my grandfather’s death, I was aware of the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic long before now. But today, with a death toll still rising from the COVID-19 pandemic, the photos he left behind have greater emotional dimension. The story is more vivid.
And those headstones listing 1918 deaths — husband, wife, mother, child — tell stories of loss and sorrow, of fractured families and communities.
My grandmother Mazie survived and went on to live a long and happy life. She eventually remarried to a wonderful man, Archibald High, who taught me how to stalk birds and to make rubber-band pistols and crossbows. She prepared countless holiday dinners, hosted the summer visits of grandchildren, and more often than not a trip to the grocery store would take half a day because she would stop to visit with everyone she saw. She died in Lindsay in 1971, a couple miles from the spot where her father had settled the family in the 1890s. She was 78 years old.
Life went on. It will again.
