Email From Gary Aden to Gary Aden
Email Dated 6/8/2001  

      With the exception of the Maggie Douglas Young Allen's belief that
their was Cherokee blood in her pedigree which contributed to "high
cheek bones" in the women and a positive assessment of her wifely and
motherly functions, little or nothing was heard from her surviving
daughters or husband. I thought it was odd that no one spoke more about
her and her death. She was simply a tragic victim of the World War I
Spanish flu epidemic and, of course, her death devestated the family was
the gospel. I asked my grandfather's second wife who had nursed her
during the terminal illness, but she simply shook her head and said she
was a fine woman who had died  tragically early. The Spanish flu
pandemic was in 1918 and Grandmother died in 1917 of "tuberculosis of
the lungs" after an 18 month illness. As a medical doctor myself, I am
curious about how she would have contacted tuberculosis, a condition
most often associated with poverty and malnutrition plus contact with a
carrier. Her father had died in 1889 of pneumonia, often confused with
tuberculosis at the time, but no other relative was suspected of
suffering from the disease or being a carrier as near I can discern. 

       In addition to the obvious emotional trauma and maternal
sustenance the early death was to inflict upon the children, the
mourning and grieving process was to be complicated by the children's
ongoing lifelong perception that the nurse-stepmother took advantage of
their widower-father's vulnerabilities by persuading him to marry her. A
covert hostile schism developed characterized by two-faced behavior and
superficial niceties while her authority and motives were undermined and
viewed in a negative way out of earshot or their dad or stepmother.

Gary Carl Aden 6/9/01