Looking up the coroner’s inquest data for Vermilion County Illinois in the historic data – last name McArdle, I was able to find 3 records. One was my 2nd great grandfather Uriah who was run over by an oxen team saving his granddaughter. One was Charles:
| MCARDLE, CHARLES |
|
M |
W |
M |
62 |
01/29/1874 |
08/28/1936 |
SUICIDE |
GUNSHOT TO THE CHEST |
The third was Roy McArdle
| MCARDLE, ROY WILLIAM |
06-01 |
M |
_ |
_ |
_ |
_ |
06/01/1923 |
ACCIDENT |
TETANUS FROM INJURY BY NAIL |
I don’t have records of Roy and this Charles in my tree, so I may have to do some digging to figure out exactly where they fit. From the dates, I would assume that Roy is an Uncle and Charles is a cousin. The inquest records are available at ISU and may list the parents, so I may venture over later and find the records.
What made me curious about these records was that Roy passed away from Tetanus from a nail injury. I now personally have racked up 3 nails and one lightening rod that I have accidently stepped on. My very first was out in the barn yard before I was 5 years old. I remember it only as far as telling my dad and as he was busy he told me to go tell my mom, so I had to limp to the house and tell her – who also busy was going to send me back to the barnyard until she noticed the blood. Of course this was now almost 50 years ago, so I’m remembering this from my child point of view. I’m sure at that point I had just had what vaccines were required for someone my age…
I actually know I accidently got all my Kindergarten shots twice, due to a mix up with my best friend of the time, Iva Sue. Iva and I would swap identities all the time and mess with the teacher. (Not to be confused with the time I took in a handwritten by me – in Kindergarten – note and gave it to the teacher saying that my name had been changed to Maria. My mother had signed it thinking it was another one of the endless papers that come home. My teacher turned the note in and my name was changed on all the records. The ‘mistake’ wasn’t caught until a couple weeks later during the parent teacher conference. BUT, the shots swap was when after doing our swap, the school happened to have vaccination day. I’d had my shots at the dr. (Dr. Elghammer) but Iva still needed hers. After I found out what was going on, I tried to explain the mixup, but no one believed us. You would think that having a cousin for principal, another cousin as janitor, and a cousin as the assistant to the first grade teacher, I would have been able to find backup, but nope. I got Iva’s shots. She still had to get her shots later, but I’m pretty sure that was the last time we pulled that swap.
In my teens I went on to step on a nail while builders were adding a garage to our house. I think the builders had left nails all over, and I just happened to find one. Years later I managed to find a lightening rod with my foot. My husband had cut it off at the ground and I made the mistake of trying to open the telephone box above it. I happened to put my foot on the spot where the rod was as I pushed up on the box cover. This did prove some law of physics, but it also proved how ridiculous it is to go out at 5 am to try to test the phone line in just a nightgown and robe with no shoes (or Pants). I made it into the house and to the bottom of the stairs – screaming up at my husband, before passing out. Being a puncture wound (AGAIN) they don’t do stitches.
My final nail was while cleaning a shed at my mothers. My mom has collections of everything! You name it you can probably find it there. Included is a shed that happened to have everything from some items from when we moved to KY and couldn’t fit things in the truck -to items that my mother has stored. There is even a hornet’s nest! The shed was falling apart, and as I opened the door another time, it turned out trim fell off onto the ground. As I walked in, I stepped on it, running it into my foot. I then had to limp to the house, while calling my dr to check on my last tetanus shot. I decided the best thing was to go to a walk in clinic. After trying to explain I was just there for a tetanus shot and yes I knew the drill, I was questioned, including to have to show the hole in my shoe… Finally I got my tetanus shot.
The thought seeing the inquest record showing that a McArdle passed away from Tetanus from a nail though, makes me very glad that I stayed up to date on my tetanus vaccine. – And that the tetanus vaccine exists. There are some vaccines that protect against childhood illnesses that kids can get and hardly be affected (in most cases), but even the most benign virus can cause serious side effects in the right circumstance. Infants can easily die of whooping cough, adults can become deathly ill from chicken pox, and so much more. My great grandfather on my maternal grandmother’s side was lost to flu in 1918. Flu is something that seems to come back every year, so far with not as high a fatality rate, but still having an effect. This year alone the flu was devastating to children.
I see posts on facebook talking about being more afraid of vaccines than the illnesses. The posts don’t put it that way, they use scare tactics – not mentioning all the deaths that are prevented by vaccines. Vaccines do save lives, sometimes it’s your own, sometimes it’s the life of the elderly or immunocompromised that you are exposed to. I shudder to think of what would happen if I had gotten tetanus from one of the nails that I have stepped on, and given my past history I can’t even say for sure that I won’t again. Tetanus can also be acquired through an open wound in infected soil – infected with the bacteria. Usually a hot wet climate.
I need to start including cause of death in my family history files, since it’s so interesting! Not just the tetanus, but everything from being run over by an oxen team while rescuing his granddaughter (Uriah McArdle), burnt in a fire (Elmer McArdle), and even bone cancer (Mildred Eldridge). Finding health trends and genetic traits is also interesting! But now I need to research where Roy and this Charles McArdle fit into the family tree…..
On both sides of my family I’ve had women that were pretty amazing as role models. Some are still around and others are just in my family history, but had an effect on the formation of who I am. If you divide my family into my four grandparents, you will find that 75% have descended from ancestors that came to the United States before the Revolution.
That last 25% was my grandmother’s family that came over from Italy in the early 1900’s. My grandmother was the last of nine children with the first three being born in Italy and coming over with 
just my great grandmother to follow her husband as he came to the Clinton IN and Belgiumtown IL, joining a cousin and finding work in a coal mine. My great grandfather came over first leaving his wife to come on a ship with three very young girls over to the US. At that point the trip involved bringing everything you wanted to keep in a chest and staying in a small area for a long time with a lot of other people, in the bottom part of the ship. Then arriving at Ellis Island, where if you (and the kids) had managed to remain healthy, you were quarantined in dormitories until you were cleared to leave the island.
My family then went on to Clinton Indiana where one of the girls passed away. Over time they lost two girls out of all their 
children, one even having the same name as my grandmother. My great grandfather worked in a coal mine, and the boys went on to join him as they became old enough. My grandmother being the youngest was the only child that managed to go to high school. My great grandmother thought that she wasn’t as healthy as the others and would end up needing to work in some field that didn’t involve as intensive work… My grandmother at one point said she had wanted to be a nurse. The kids all pulled money together and grandma made it to high school. She borrowed books and studied as much as she could, going on to be a school teacher at the point when a college degree wasn’t necessary.
My great grandfather had passed away when my grandmother was only two from the flu of 1918. He was in the process of applying for citizenship at the time, so the paperwork didn’t get completed. I’m not sure when my aunt’s finished their paperwork, but my great grandmother didn’t apply until shortly before her death in the 60s. She lived simply in a small house in Belgiumtown Illinois, grew her own food, and cleaned houses for the coal miners in the area. Most of my aunts and uncles lived nearby – within just a few blocks.
When my mother’s father drowned while my mother was only about 3, my grandmother and mother moved in with my great grandmother. When my grandparents married my grandmother had to quit teaching since women teachers were not allowed to be married at that time. (It seems crazy now to think about the restrictions they faced!) My grandmother went on to do several things to keep my mother and herself fed and clothed until she met her second husband.
Even having never met my great grandmother I can say she was pretty amazing. Traveling to a new country with three young kids by herself, not knowing the language, then raising the kids including suffering the loss of two of her children – and then the loss of her husband, and keeping everyone fed and clothed is pretty amazing. Part of the time this occurred was during WWI and WWII when Italians weren’t high on the list of favorite people in the United States. I remember one day coming home to tell my grandmother a new joke someone had told me that involved Italians. I had no clue what the term Daigo meant, I’m not even sure the kid that told me the joke knew what it meant. But my grandmother knew! My grandmother could swear up a storm, but that was one word I learned not to ever repeat again. There were others, things kids called them in school, but that one was my first experience with what my grandmother faced growing up.
My grandmother when first married had lived in a little shack, using a drawer for my mother to sleep in. My grandfather worked a coal mine with his brothers – my grandmother’s brother built the shack if I remember right. I’ve written about the stories from when my grandmother met her second husband, and remarried. Like my great grandmother she originally avoided getting remarried.
There are so many things I learned from my grandmother, and so much more I could have learned from her. All my grandmother’s (and aunts) have served through time as strong role models.
Finding information about Sarah Prickett and Uriah Morgan has required some real detective work. So far I haven’t ventured off the web to search, and have found references to Sarah with Uriah a few places. Sarah Prickett’s family is well known throughout the area (so was Morgan’s)!
Undocumented records I have found, show Sarah as having been born in 1775 and surviving until 1832. She most likely married Uriah Morgan in the late 1700s. – Other undocumented records show children starting around 1798. Their daughter Nancy Morgan was my 3rd great grandmother that married John McArdle in Tyler County, Virginia and then moved on to Illinois. Surprisingly Nancy passed away 1839, perhaps explaining how she lost touch with her family. Though distance and the lack of reliable communication at the time is more likely the cause.
The one piece of documentation I have found that shows Sarah Prickett being a Morgan is Josiah Prickett’s will. Josiah has listed his daughter Sarah Morgan as one of his beneficiaries. This shows that at the time of the will Sarah was now a Morgan.
Visiting the area around Prickett’s fort and Morgantown is on my list, and I plan to explore more later. For now though this is interesting and gives me something concrete to include in my file!
There are a lot of scary things going on right now with schools for sure ! We’ve looked at the small school district that
I’ve been seeing a story about an isolation room in a classroom in Loudin County that was captured by a special needs students iPad. It’s not the school we are looking at moving to – not even close, but seeing things like that is pretty scary when you are in a really good school and you are moving to a new school.
Seeing this story always reminds me of a boy that was in my 5th grade class – in the 70s, really he was in my K- 8 at least…. The teacher actually took tall bookcases and made a cage for him and put them around his desk at the back of the classroom. I don’t think it went on for several weeks, but I remember it going on for a little while…. The teacher finally made a deal with the student that he could goof off for a short time each day if he behaved the rest as something they both could live with. So I remember the first day of the ‘truce’ being the boy wheeling the teacher’s chair up and down the rows of desks and singing Row Row Row my boat… Thinking back I wonder what the parents would have thought of what was going on in our classroom. I know my mother tried to get that teacher elected when he ran for office years later, ‘to get him out of the classroom’… but I’m fairly certain that had to do with all the other years.
For me I remember that particular teacher as helping with a few things I needed help with. I was ahead in math in 5th grade and he let me work ahead, which really meant in 6th grade when I had to go back to material I already knew I pretty much gave up on math. 5th grade was the year I learned how to do 8th grade math, binary arithmetic and really enjoyed math. He was also our science teacher for 6th grade and when he caught my best friend, Iva and I with a dictionary we had made with our own secret language – he gave us time during class to work on it.
So I have to admit I have good and bad memories from growing up in a small town school as the geeky misfit kid. So is it best to move to a small town where every knows each other and there is more chance for the teachers to know everyone. That same environment also means though that the small cliques that form tend to be more lifetime cliques. I’ve only seen the larger schools through each of my children’s experiences. For high school the large school battled us on everything from not allowing our exchange student attend to not allowing a schedule change mistake to be fixed until the second week because they were too busy with the freshmen. Then there was the year my oldest had class in the cafeteria which also met in the entryway of the high school at one point. He and two other students got forgotten for a special freshman award their freshman year because they were advanced and placed in with the upper classroom during the time period that the other students were pulled out for the award. We’ve also had them accidently schedule kids for the classes and their pre-reqs for their same semester, and even better, send truancy notices for not sending letters explaining that we were called to pick them up from school when they got sick and had to sign them out of the high school.
The grade school I attended is no longer open, it was actually two buildings spread over two towns. Muncie Fithian…. Muncie is now considered unsafe and is used for storage, Fithian is used for a private home. At Muncie my cousin Olive Richter was the aid to the 1st grade teacher, my cousin Charlie Mitchill was the principal for the first two years, and my cousin Randy was the janitor. At Fithian, my Aunt Ethel was in the office! It was great seeing my aunt everyday. I also would take the bus over to Muncie and participate in things at the church at Muncie Baptist despite not being a congregation member myself and being Catholic, they always let me participate (bible school and choir)… I would practice after school with the choir and then my cousin Olive would drive me home. I remember getting the chance to walk from Muncie school to the church with Iva and enjoying the freedom of wandering the town – and with Muncie that is pretty much the entire town.
Moving to Oakwood, we will be going to the new school, but right around the corner is the ‘new’ ice cream shop and a library. I can already picture school pick up next year involving a chance to stop at the library and then get ice cream on the way home before fixing dinner. The ice cream shop has pizza too! I forsee a lot of pizza dinner nights in our future.
Time to go sledding! It finally snowed here! Time to go sledding. Growing up we had a lot more snow than we have here in Kentucky. I remember playing on snow mobiles, riding on the river, going on trips through the woods from house to house. Friends would show up on snow mobiles and we would hop on ours and join the caravan.
My dad would also take the tractor and plow our driveway, making a huge snow pile for us in the yard. My brother and I would spend hours making snow tunnels through the piles. The tunnels would be a few feet long and perfect for sliding down over and over. We would make igloos out in the yard and carry out our supplies to hang out in the yard, then spend the day playing outside.
Snow would drift against all the fence rows and pile up to be several feet high. I remember riding snow mobiles across the tops, above the fields – and that one time we hit the gap in the snow. My mother was driving and I was riding and off we went into the air. Nothing… I still keep saying we were lucky to have survived childhood.
We would ride up hills that I would now swear were at a 90 degree angle to the ground but surely weren’t completely 90 degrees, riding across rivers, with my dad’s instructions to not stop since it wasn’t frozen solid (go fast!), and of course we each had our own snow mobiles. My father’s snow mobile was an el Tigre that had been modified to race. it was rare for my parents to let us ride it…. Mine was an arctic cat and so pretty! I loved it, and I had the full snow suit with helmet, pants, snow boots, you name it. It was our regular outfits for the winter and when not on us you put it on the earth stove to dry.
Of course one of the most important things to remember was to pee first. If you didn’t you had to hold it for a long time. We would go out and ride for hours. I kind of remember sleds being pulled behind snow mobiles, but it was more common years earlier to pull the sleds behind the mower.
Snow in the country also meant power outages, so we would use the wood stoves, wood furnaces, fireplaces, and kerosene lamps. Toilets had to be flushed with whatever water was available and there was no way to wash up…. Well’s don’t work without power. But I don’t remember it being that bad, though I do remember times when the power went out for a week or more at a time.
While we were playing outside, my dad would either join us or work around the farm moving snow with tractors. Sometimes dad would end up having to tow people out of the ditch. Dad was the go to person for anyone in the area being stuck in a ditch… surprisingly this meant we had a liquor closet completely stocked (although I don’t remember my dad drinking much). A lot of the that liquor is still in the closet. Dad would take his tractor and drive to wherever he was needed and pull the car, truck or whatever out of the ditch.
I still love the thought of sitting in the corner of the kitchen by the earth stove during the winter, reading a book! I’m sure I still have a scar on my arm where I touched the stove and got a burn once too often, but I loved that corner of the kitchen. I’ve tried sitting on the floor in front of our fireplace with a book in our house, but it just doesn’t have that cozy feel of the corner behind the wood stove.
