On 23 February 1931, my father’s uncle, Frank Anthony Klein, had some sort of possibly epileptic seizure and crashed his automobile into a tree. He died from his injuries, and his mother grieved deeply for him. She had already lost her oldest daughter and Frank was her only son.
A little over a year after that tragic event, his mother, Margarethe Wendel Klein, died of cancer, or so my father told me, in her home in Elmhurst, Illinois. I think these photos are of her grave at the cemetery because I don’t see her sitting next to her husband, my great-grandfather, Frank Klein. He is wearing glasses and has a mustache.
Here’s a close-up of the grave with its flowers.
The family is buried at Elm Lawn Cemetery in Elmhurst. Margarethe would have had a Catholic funeral service.
One twist (isn’t there always a twist or a mystery?): Margarethe’s death certificate says she died of Diabetic Coma. And that she had had Myocarditis for 10 years and Nephritis (institial) for 6 years. Myocarditis is an inflammation of the middle layer of the heart wall, and apparently it can be caused by a virus and may resolve. Interstitial nephritis is a kidney disorder. So she had diabetes. So did her daughter, my grandmother.
Why did my father think she died of cancer? He and his siblings and mother lived with his grandparents at the time, and he remembers his grandmother “lying in the library dying, while we played outside.”
Margarethe Wendel Klein
Helen, Marie, Elizabeth, Margarethe, Peter (SIL)
Frank Sr. on the ground with his grandkids
Uncle Frank and Grandma Marie Klein c. 1920
The Family Kalamazoo 
Interesting as you dig through the cobwebs of the decades….
It’s a lot of fun. It’s a good thing it’s virtual. I’m not fond of spiders ;)!
Maybe he thought she died of cancer because he didn’t understand the other causes and just said cancer. I probably would have back then. I love Margarethe’s hat. Wish women wore those today. Classy!
Maybe they explained it that way to him or he assumed that when he was a kid and it just became part of the “story.” I love those big hats!
Always a twist – interesting what and how people remember things and stories are passed down. Thanks for sharing
It’s like that telephone game when we were kids haha!
Kids assume things they don’t know — or maybe they remembered wrong — or maybe they were told wrong.
And it stays with them and gets passed down to the next generation.
I’ve seen the diagnosis of myocarditis on many old death certificates, and I think the term was used much more loosely then compared to now. Unless an autopsy was done to confirm the diagnosis, it’s likely that the diagnosis was used as a catch-all for congestive heart failure, ischemic heart disease, or any condition where there were cardiac symptoms.
You are probably right. I sort of felt that way when I started searching old documents, but then there were so many “big word” diagnoses like that they I started to “believe” them. But it’s true that I shouldn’t rely too much on what it says. Thanks, Jon!
I wonder how many family stories get twisted around as they get passed down over the years? Thank You for the interesting story.
That’s a scary thought, isn’t it? Especially when we rely on them for leads of what to research! Yikes.
I agree that he likely assumed cancer because she was sick. I am not sure how sophisticated people were about medicine back then (or even now).
I always figured that if somebody was going to assume something in “those days,” that it might be whatever contagious illness was going the rounds. But from research it does seem that there was a lot more cardiac and cancer illnesses than I realized. Sort of like today . . . .
After the TVA reached certain parts of Appalachia, deaths from stomach cancer plummeted because people didn’t have to preserve meat by salting it. Probably true of a lot of other places, but The Squire is very familiar with those statistics.
Oh, wow, that is so interesting! The overuse of salt caused stomach cancer? How horrible.
Mionsiog has a very good point. My mum told me a relative had died at the local mental hospital because he had been driven crazy by a certain religious group. Turned out said hospital was both a mental hospital and a TB sanitarium. Relative had tuberculosis.
Oh gosh!!! What an amazing “reconstruction” of history heh.
Sometimes people don’t tell children much when someone is seriously ill in an attempt to protect them. Perhaps your father was left to just guess what was wrong with her.
He was so so young when she died that he could have only been told later, I am thinking. He was not even four yet! He always claimed he had a bad memory for early stuff, but he had fond memories of his grandmother.
Looking back, I have caught my parents in lies they told us kids. These stories usually referred to sickness or some family situation with Aunts/Uncles. Looking back, and with more understanding that raising your own kids bring, I think the stories my parents told were attempts to keep thing simple for us, to hide some harsh truths from us, and also because some things they did not understand themselves. Thank you.
Spyro, it’s so true that when we have our own kids we start to understand things that seemed inexplicable before. I love the reasons you give here for why parents don’t always tell their children the truth about family matters.