A Season of Death

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.   (Shakespeare, King Lear)

The spring of 1910 was a season of death among the Chesters.

For several weeks Henry Chester's health had been deteriorating. Sometime early in March 1910, he took to his bed, probably expecting never to rise from it again.

Hearing of his condition, his children left their various households to come back to the old Ainsworth home, so Henry was surrounded by family. Considering the state of medicine during his lifetime, he had been fortunate: though he had lost at least one child in infancy, nine others survived to adulthood, and of those only one had died before him — his eldest, Mary. Now Ella, at 43, was the eldest, and the youngest was Daisy, just 21, who six weeks earlier had given birth to her second child.

So they gathered to say their last farewell to their father, while Death hovered in the background.

And then, it seems, Death decided to play a cruel and macabre joke.

A few days after her arrival in Ainsworth, Daisy fell ill with quinsy (peritonsillar abscess). On Sunday, March 13, she suddenly died.

Her funeral took place in the Chester home on Wednesday. I don't know whether Henry was able to rise from his bed for the occasion, but the same issue of the Gazette that carried Daisy's obituary also reported that "Henry Chester's condition [was] slightly improved."

Daisy is buried in Chester Cemetery. Her first name was actually Hallie, but she always went by her middle name, and now it's graven in stone.


(Click on images to enlarge)



According to the Northwest Indiana Genealogical Society's Ross Township Cemeteries, Daisy's husband Edward was buried here too (in spite of that fact that he later remarried), but I haven't been able to find his grave marker. Perhaps it is the broken one next to hers.



(To be continued)


Sources:
♦ "Dies Suddenly." Hobart Gazette 18 March 1910.
♦ "Local Drifts." Hobart Gazette 18 March 1910.