52 Ancestors 2023 Week 9: Gone Too Soon

So this one is likely to be sad.  My mind went to children, an aunt on my father's side, and a cousin on my mother's, who had died before they got a chance to grow up.  Maybe they would have survived if they'd been born in later years when medicine had more tools to help infection or to repair a heart defect but that was not to be.

My mother's aunt Myrtle gave birth to baby Dorothy in Meridian, Idaho on November 26, 1916.  Dorothy died that same day, according to her death certificate due to a "failure of valve in heart to close."  She was issued both a birth certificate, since she was born alive, and a death certificate.  Her parents were only 19 and 20 at the time.  Myrtle herself died February 27, 1919, just two years later.

My father's sister, Virginia Prewitt*, was born in 1911 and died on November 8, 1914.  The family story was that she was three when this happened, but the cause of death was never mentioned to me.  All I heard was that my grandmother was so overcome with grief that she consoled herself by overeating:  she was pregnant with my father who was born 2-1/2 months later weighing over 13 pounds (per the family story, I have not been able to confirm anything except that he was born on January 28, 1915).  In fact, all I can find for poor Virginia is an entry on FindaGrave that does not even have a picture of her stone.  I will try to look when next I get a chance to stop in Tumwater, Washington, where she is buried.  My grandmother did not have another child after my father until my uncle Norman was born in 1923, eight years later.

So, gone too soon, maybe because they were born too soon for help to be available.

*I think she was probably named after her mother's mother, Sarah Virginia (Barnes) Howdeshell, known as Ginny.