On This Day - 7 February - The Tragic Tale of Luutske Hilbrands Oosterwal

Question

On this day in Oosterwal family history...

Most of the time genealogical research consists of fairly sterile records; a person is born, there is a marriage event followed by the births of several children who also get married, and then the person dies after a life of sixty or seventy years.  Occasionally we get lucky and find a little story in a newspaper article or court document and then we piece the fragments together to get an idea about who this person was.  As expected, most people have relatively uneventful lives.

This was not the case for poor Luutske Hilbrands Oosterwal.

Luutske was born in the town of Hallum near the northern coast of the province of Friesland in the Netherlands on 7 February 1815.  Her father died when she was three months old and her mother remarried--this was not uncommon in those days.  Ten days before her twenty-first birthday she married Halbe Lubberts Westra and they embarked on what should have been a happy journey, but the last six years of her short life produced more heartbreak than a Shakespearean play.

It's surprising how much of a story a handful of sterile records can tell.  (Read all the tragic details on her profile.)

Answer 1

Tuberculosis could do that to a family, wipe them out one by one. And when a baby dies early, the next pregnancy is likely to come sooner.

We see so many dead babies when we visit the old records - a reminder how harsh life could be back then. When there is not a single surviving child in a branch, I feel more responsible than usual to add them to the big tree - since they have no descendants to do it for them.

Thanks for taking care of Luutske's memory.

Comments

You know, I think it would be appropriate to set the status for all the dead babies to "unmarried" and "no children". That way the tragedy would show up in the descendant views:

https://www.wikitree.com/genealogy/Jans-Descendants-3200

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Absolutely.  Thanks for the reminder.

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Eva, that's a very good possibility that tuberculosis had a big part in the deaths; I had not considered that before.  Most other commonly known diseases will pass through a community and be gone in a relatively short time, but TB can get into clothing and blankets and infect a new person at a much later time.

I read somewhere that this was a big problem in the Netherlands where girls would inherit the elaborate and costly traditional clothing from their mothers and grandmothers and get an unexpected extra gift of TB in the clothing.

Thanks for the suggestion; I'll add it as another thing to consider in the list of unknowns.

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There were a lot of deaths in tuberculosis in Sweden as well, and I think it could cause the pattern of Luutske's family.

I recognize the patterns of epidemics, too, of course - infectious diseases like typhoid fever or the winter flu causing a peak in mortality, smallpox "harvesting" a bunch of children (not so many adults).

In other cases the deaths of many babies in a family seems to be a matter of the reproductive health of a woman. There is a pattern where the earliest children grow up healthy, then she starts having stillbirths or very shortlived babies - which tend to come too close together, because she isn't breastfeeding - and finally she dies in connection with the last birth. Makes me very sad to see.

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In other cases the deaths of many babies in a family seems to be a matter of the reproductive health of a woman. There is a pattern where the earliest children grow up healthy, then she starts having stillbirths or very shortlived babies - which tend to come too close together, because she isn't breastfeeding - and finally she dies in connection with the last birth. Makes me very sad to see.

commented 9 hours ago by Eva Ekeblad

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 It wasn't always the mother's (reproductive or otherwise) health that was the issue.  What used to be known as "blue babies" (NOT the "blue baby syndrome" of today, but blood incompatibility) took the lives of numerous 2nd, 3rd, or subsequent babies.  Rhesus factor incompatibility, where the mother has Rh negative blood and the father has Rh positive.  The FIRST baby is usually fine.  Even the second baby can be fine IF it has the mother's blood type.  If baby 1 is same blood type as mum, no problem.  If baby 1 has opposite blood type, no problem for baby 1, BUT a problem may be there for baby 2 if baby 2 has opposite blood type.  For subsequent babies if their blood type is the same as mum's, it should be ok.  It's when the baby's blood type is opposite, that the antibodies that have been building up since the first non-same blood type baby came along start to attack the new baby growing.  Once we knew about blood types and what the Rh factor meant/did, we pretty much eradicated this situation, which is why the term "blue baby" now means something else.

But back in the day, many babies were stillborn, or died soon after birth because of this.  It would have been even more difficult then to understand why only some babies died this way.  If you had 2 babies, baby 3 died, baby 4 died, baby 5 was fine, baby 6 died .. and so on, and you didn't know it was a blood issue, you'd put it down to almost anything .. a curse, God's punishment, disease, the mother's bad habits, the mother being a fallen woman.

We have no way of knowing how many of our "died young" or "died stillborn" babies were of this, or disease (measles, smallpox, diphtheria, whooping cough), or the mother's health/nutrition, or something else.

Just something to consider.  (My daughter is Rhesus negative, but was told this was not an issue for her due to modern medical knowledge.  Fifty years earlier, maybe, and it could have been a different story.)

Answer 2

Erik, Luutske’s profile was nicely done. So tragic.

Comments

Thank you.