My great grandmother, daughter of Ida T Wenhold and Lewis S Garner. She may have been named after her father's little sister. Her father was killed in a train mishap near Flourtown when she was about age 6. Her mother survived by doing housework and taking in laundry while sending the children out to work at young ages. Lillian began working at 13.
She was 15 when she eloped with William Franklin Jenkins, escaping a life of toiling in a rope factory. By age 16 she was a mother, and by 23 she had had several miscarriages, one child who died, while four lived to adulthood. Her husband worked long hours as a painter and trapper. Beyond his income, his sole contribution to the household was to chop wood, while she did the rest, which included cooking on a wood stove, hauling water for cooking and baths, and manually scrubbing clothes on a washboard. She was a quintessential Pennsylvania Dutch housekeeper with a sparkling home. In her rare free time in the evenings, after her work was done and before her husband would come home, she would swing on a tree-hanging swing. Their marriage finally was made official at the end of 1925 when she was 27, 12 years after their elopement. It was to last no more than five more years. In retrospect I wonder if the marriage were an attempt by her husband to solidify a relationship he may have known was fraying. Or was it one he frayed himself? The 1940 census shows William and his new family, and his daughter Ida is shown as being born about 1923, and son Gerald in 1927 - so the ages of these kids needs to be checked before further assigning motivations. But...
The image of Lillian on a swing became a metaphor for her life. By the 1930 census, she is with another man, Harold P. McBride from New York state, aka "Harry" with whom she had no known children, and from whom she was later separated. On the census she is using his last name, but it seems she kept or reverted to her first married name, as shown in a 1944 family baby book where she is referred to as Granny Jenkins. This makes sense in that her divorce from her husband William did not take place officially until 1947, by which time she'd long ago parted with Harry McBride, and her children had grown. So she and Harry were common law spouses at best.
One of her offspring was my grandmother, Dorothy Ida Jenkins Storkey. Lillian would give Dorothy the middle name of Ida, after her own mother.
It is hard to know what to think of Lillian. Her life had been hard, yet some of her later difficulties were apparently brought upon herself. If an account by her daughter, my grandmother, can be believed, Lillian strayed from her marriage. It seems her husband did continue to support her and the children, right up until he learned that another man was living under the roof he was paying for. Upon his telling her to have Harry move out, Lillian responded "If he goes, I go" and go they both did.
After that, her life and the lives of her children were difficult and scattered, her children shuttling between her home with Harry and her ex-husband's home with a new companion named Lena who had many children of her own and of her first deceased husband's as well. Lillian's son William ended up mostly with his grandmother, while the girls Alice and Lillian went mostly between the parents, and my grandmother Dorothy was also sent packing. My grandmother recalls being left with family and family friends as well, on several occasions not warned in advance. She also went to various relatives, including some of Harry's family in Connecticut.
I don't know if we'll ever find a lot more out about Harold, so let's give him a good paragraph here. Harold was the son of Robert J and Edith C McBride, seen on the 1910 census in Brooklyn, Kings County, New York. Early on, in 1920, he's in the Virgin Islands as a sailor. Somewhere along the line he must have found his way to Pennsylvania and met Lillian. Bearing in mind that Lillian was a rather difficult person who also had four children, one is tempted to think he must have been a man of much forbearance to have stepped up to the plate in loving her, and pitching in to try to raise those kids. The record left by my grandma does not tell if he were a successful stepfather, and indeed, her writings refer to him very little at all. The only impression left is that as a girl seeking her mom's attention, my young grandmother seemed to feel he was in the way. There's no date known for when Lillian and Harold went their separate ways. On the 1930 census the two are together living in Lansdale Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. By the 1940 census, Harold McBride is back in Brooklyn, King's County, New York, now at 584-A Halsey. It must be him; his age is right and he is a New York born longshoreman. His wife Betty was born in Maine and they have a daughter, Fay, born about 1931, whose birthplace is Pennsylvania. (Hauntingly, his new wife is only 4 years older than my grandma, his stepdaughter. Doing the math, 26 year old Betty must have been age 17 when she had Fay, and it's hard not to wonder about Harry's attraction to younger women when he had three young stepdaughters, though it is unfair to cast aspersions on his character.) Further, going back to Harry's new family on 1940's census, Harry reports they were living in the same home in 1935, so clearly between their daughter Fay's birth 9 years ago in Pennsylvania and this declaration of being in the same home in 1935, the couple has been settled for five to nine years, or 1931 at the earliest. "The Harry Years" for my great grandma Lillian may not have been many. Even if she commenced with Harry right after her 1925 marriage formalization with William Jenkins, the maximum time together with Harry would have been 1925 to 1931, or six years, and it was possibly even less than that. Still, in working the timeline, it does seem like Harry and his extended family was in touch after Lillian and Harold broke up. A family member born in 1944 has a baby book recording a present from "Mrs. McBride". It's possible that this is Harry's wife or his mother who was still alive for the 1940 census, then age 62.
After Harry was out of the picture, Lillian had several apartments and the children mostly stayed with her, though my grandmother was often out of town with relatives, finally returning home at Lillian's request when Lillian had secured a new home and had all the kids there together. My grandmother had left Washington DC for this request after a failed young love, but would meet my grandpa and marry in late 1937, so clearly Lillian's "new home" for her and her now-adult children was a bit before 1937.
Eventually the kids grew up and had their own families. For a time, Lillian lived with various amongst them. It's remembered at one place she somehow set her little room on fire. She'd not said anything, but a family member noticed that she'd came out for her third glass of water in a minute. No harm done. It finally got to the point where family found it impossible to care for her, and she apparently lived out the rest of her life in a hospital. She's remembered as a tiny woman who complained constantly that she was in pain. Family lore is that when she died she was found to have had a perforated ulcer and really had been in pain, but it does not seem to have been her cause of death.
A perforated ulcer is basically an ulcer that hasn't been treated and has burned through a wall. Before they perforate, peptic ulcers (often caused by the Helicobacter pylori bacteria) themselves are extremely painful and happen in the stomach or the duodenum (the first part of the small intestine, just after the stomach). Gastrointestinal bleeding is the most common complication, and sudden large bleeding can be life-threatening when the ulcer erodes one of the blood vessels.
Once a peptic ulcer has moved into being a perforated ulcer worse things can happen. One consequence is spilling of the stomach or intestinal contents into the abdomen. If the perforation is in the front of the stomach it may lead to acute peritonitis (inflammation of the peritoneum, the thin tissue lining the abdomen and the organs) which is intensely painful. If the perforation is at the rear, there may be bleeding from the gastroduodenal artery. In any case, the perforation can move into adjacent organs like the liver or pancreas. Because of the seriousness, perforated ulcers are one of the few conditions where surgery is done on an ulcer as it may be life threatening. Whether it got her in the end or not, and it seems not to have done so, it probably made her life very difficult.
I don't know how much of Lillian's years of erratic behavior were the result of her circumstances in losing her father, working as a child and eloping at 15, and having miscarriages, nor how much sprang from an unhappy mind. I do know that her unsettled life led my grandmother to have feelings of abandonment from her childhood that she carried all her life. Still, my grandmother also carried happy memories of her mother as well, of her impeccable housekeeping, of her tiny beauty, of black hair that hung to her waist that she wore piled high upon her head, of her dark eyes, and of her swinging alone in that tree swing on quiet evenings when all her housework was done.
______________________________________
Death certificate data: From her death certificate, we finally get Lillian's exact dates of birth and death as reflected above. An inpatient at Norristown State Hospital, she was listed as "Lillian Garner Jenkins" and as widowed. Her parents are correctly listed, and she is shown as having been born in Lansdale, Montgomery County, which will need to be checked as it seems at odds with what we know.
Her informant was William F. Jenkins, presumably her son who had the same name as his father. (Lillian's ex-husband William was deceased by the time of Lillian's death.) In handling this information and talking with the funeral home, I learned that "the informant" is not the person reporting the death, but the person giving information about the deceased for the death certificate, so William (or any family) may or may not have been present at her passing. We may be pretty certain she died the the hospital itself, because the death certificate states very clearly that she lived within the actual boundaries of Norristown. Further, it is signed by Frances S. Cerra, D.O. of the Norristown State Hospital. I believe this name is typed erroneously, as it appears in the signature to have a middle initial of "A" and there is a living D.O. of that name.
Lillian died at 2:45 p.m. DST on August 29, 1985, and the certificate claims burial as happening the next day, which is a tad misleading as she was cremated by the Lansdale Crematorium. Arrangements, whatever they were, were handled by Holcombe Funeral Home who says that no services were held, and the ashes were returned to the family. In their records, "the family" is shown as Dorothy and William (two of her four children).
My grandmother Dorothy, her daughter, for her own death chose cremation and having her ashes scattered. Perhaps this choice was made for her mother Lillian as well. My suspicion is that my grandmother scattered Lilian's ashes in the woods near her home, as she is thought to have done with those of her sister.
The immediate causes of death were listed as "respiratory arrest due to medullary failure, due to pneumonia". The pneumonia was listed as having occurred within days of death, while medullary failure and respiratory arrest were listed as occurring within minutes of her death. I am no expert, but have been able to piece together that if the medulla (which governs breathing) fails, the person stops breathing. How this would connect with pneumonia I do not understand. If you have pneumonia and respiratory arrest, why the medulla would be involved is beyond me. All I can tell you is that the lady was age 87 and institutionalized, and she may have been very glad to go. We can only hope that Lillian found the peace that seems to have eluded her for most of her life.
The lady lost her father, worked and married young, miscarried several children, lost one young child, blew up her marriage, had a poor second marriage, and lost two of her adult children who died before her own passing in a state hospital. There is also a vague family story about her falling from a tractor or horse drawn hay rake, and being dragged for a considerable distance, and when this happened or whether it had any bearing on her mental status is not known. Her life was a train wreck, as surely as the one that killed her daddy when she was 6. The living, who mostly did not know her well personally, heard difficult stories about her and remember her as making their own parents' marriages difficult. She is not well-loved in memory, but I find myself having a lot of sympathy for her anyway.
Research note: Holcombe Funeral Home handled her ashes giving them to family, whom they have as her children Dorothy and William, but no living family descendants know where the ashes were placed or scattered.
She was 15 when she eloped with William Franklin Jenkins, escaping a life of toiling in a rope factory. By age 16 she was a mother, and by 23 she had had several miscarriages, one child who died, while four lived to adulthood. Her husband worked long hours as a painter and trapper. Beyond his income, his sole contribution to the household was to chop wood, while she did the rest, which included cooking on a wood stove, hauling water for cooking and baths, and manually scrubbing clothes on a washboard. She was a quintessential Pennsylvania Dutch housekeeper with a sparkling home. In her rare free time in the evenings, after her work was done and before her husband would come home, she would swing on a tree-hanging swing. Their marriage finally was made official at the end of 1925 when she was 27, 12 years after their elopement. It was to last no more than five more years. In retrospect I wonder if the marriage were an attempt by her husband to solidify a relationship he may have known was fraying. Or was it one he frayed himself? The 1940 census shows William and his new family, and his daughter Ida is shown as being born about 1923, and son Gerald in 1927 - so the ages of these kids needs to be checked before further assigning motivations. But...
The image of Lillian on a swing became a metaphor for her life. By the 1930 census, she is with another man, Harold P. McBride from New York state, aka "Harry" with whom she had no known children, and from whom she was later separated. On the census she is using his last name, but it seems she kept or reverted to her first married name, as shown in a 1944 family baby book where she is referred to as Granny Jenkins. This makes sense in that her divorce from her husband William did not take place officially until 1947, by which time she'd long ago parted with Harry McBride, and her children had grown. So she and Harry were common law spouses at best.
One of her offspring was my grandmother, Dorothy Ida Jenkins Storkey. Lillian would give Dorothy the middle name of Ida, after her own mother.
It is hard to know what to think of Lillian. Her life had been hard, yet some of her later difficulties were apparently brought upon herself. If an account by her daughter, my grandmother, can be believed, Lillian strayed from her marriage. It seems her husband did continue to support her and the children, right up until he learned that another man was living under the roof he was paying for. Upon his telling her to have Harry move out, Lillian responded "If he goes, I go" and go they both did.
After that, her life and the lives of her children were difficult and scattered, her children shuttling between her home with Harry and her ex-husband's home with a new companion named Lena who had many children of her own and of her first deceased husband's as well. Lillian's son William ended up mostly with his grandmother, while the girls Alice and Lillian went mostly between the parents, and my grandmother Dorothy was also sent packing. My grandmother recalls being left with family and family friends as well, on several occasions not warned in advance. She also went to various relatives, including some of Harry's family in Connecticut.
I don't know if we'll ever find a lot more out about Harold, so let's give him a good paragraph here. Harold was the son of Robert J and Edith C McBride, seen on the 1910 census in Brooklyn, Kings County, New York. Early on, in 1920, he's in the Virgin Islands as a sailor. Somewhere along the line he must have found his way to Pennsylvania and met Lillian. Bearing in mind that Lillian was a rather difficult person who also had four children, one is tempted to think he must have been a man of much forbearance to have stepped up to the plate in loving her, and pitching in to try to raise those kids. The record left by my grandma does not tell if he were a successful stepfather, and indeed, her writings refer to him very little at all. The only impression left is that as a girl seeking her mom's attention, my young grandmother seemed to feel he was in the way. There's no date known for when Lillian and Harold went their separate ways. On the 1930 census the two are together living in Lansdale Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. By the 1940 census, Harold McBride is back in Brooklyn, King's County, New York, now at 584-A Halsey. It must be him; his age is right and he is a New York born longshoreman. His wife Betty was born in Maine and they have a daughter, Fay, born about 1931, whose birthplace is Pennsylvania. (Hauntingly, his new wife is only 4 years older than my grandma, his stepdaughter. Doing the math, 26 year old Betty must have been age 17 when she had Fay, and it's hard not to wonder about Harry's attraction to younger women when he had three young stepdaughters, though it is unfair to cast aspersions on his character.) Further, going back to Harry's new family on 1940's census, Harry reports they were living in the same home in 1935, so clearly between their daughter Fay's birth 9 years ago in Pennsylvania and this declaration of being in the same home in 1935, the couple has been settled for five to nine years, or 1931 at the earliest. "The Harry Years" for my great grandma Lillian may not have been many. Even if she commenced with Harry right after her 1925 marriage formalization with William Jenkins, the maximum time together with Harry would have been 1925 to 1931, or six years, and it was possibly even less than that. Still, in working the timeline, it does seem like Harry and his extended family was in touch after Lillian and Harold broke up. A family member born in 1944 has a baby book recording a present from "Mrs. McBride". It's possible that this is Harry's wife or his mother who was still alive for the 1940 census, then age 62.
After Harry was out of the picture, Lillian had several apartments and the children mostly stayed with her, though my grandmother was often out of town with relatives, finally returning home at Lillian's request when Lillian had secured a new home and had all the kids there together. My grandmother had left Washington DC for this request after a failed young love, but would meet my grandpa and marry in late 1937, so clearly Lillian's "new home" for her and her now-adult children was a bit before 1937.
Eventually the kids grew up and had their own families. For a time, Lillian lived with various amongst them. It's remembered at one place she somehow set her little room on fire. She'd not said anything, but a family member noticed that she'd came out for her third glass of water in a minute. No harm done. It finally got to the point where family found it impossible to care for her, and she apparently lived out the rest of her life in a hospital. She's remembered as a tiny woman who complained constantly that she was in pain. Family lore is that when she died she was found to have had a perforated ulcer and really had been in pain, but it does not seem to have been her cause of death.
A perforated ulcer is basically an ulcer that hasn't been treated and has burned through a wall. Before they perforate, peptic ulcers (often caused by the Helicobacter pylori bacteria) themselves are extremely painful and happen in the stomach or the duodenum (the first part of the small intestine, just after the stomach). Gastrointestinal bleeding is the most common complication, and sudden large bleeding can be life-threatening when the ulcer erodes one of the blood vessels.
Once a peptic ulcer has moved into being a perforated ulcer worse things can happen. One consequence is spilling of the stomach or intestinal contents into the abdomen. If the perforation is in the front of the stomach it may lead to acute peritonitis (inflammation of the peritoneum, the thin tissue lining the abdomen and the organs) which is intensely painful. If the perforation is at the rear, there may be bleeding from the gastroduodenal artery. In any case, the perforation can move into adjacent organs like the liver or pancreas. Because of the seriousness, perforated ulcers are one of the few conditions where surgery is done on an ulcer as it may be life threatening. Whether it got her in the end or not, and it seems not to have done so, it probably made her life very difficult.
I don't know how much of Lillian's years of erratic behavior were the result of her circumstances in losing her father, working as a child and eloping at 15, and having miscarriages, nor how much sprang from an unhappy mind. I do know that her unsettled life led my grandmother to have feelings of abandonment from her childhood that she carried all her life. Still, my grandmother also carried happy memories of her mother as well, of her impeccable housekeeping, of her tiny beauty, of black hair that hung to her waist that she wore piled high upon her head, of her dark eyes, and of her swinging alone in that tree swing on quiet evenings when all her housework was done.
______________________________________
Death certificate data: From her death certificate, we finally get Lillian's exact dates of birth and death as reflected above. An inpatient at Norristown State Hospital, she was listed as "Lillian Garner Jenkins" and as widowed. Her parents are correctly listed, and she is shown as having been born in Lansdale, Montgomery County, which will need to be checked as it seems at odds with what we know.
Her informant was William F. Jenkins, presumably her son who had the same name as his father. (Lillian's ex-husband William was deceased by the time of Lillian's death.) In handling this information and talking with the funeral home, I learned that "the informant" is not the person reporting the death, but the person giving information about the deceased for the death certificate, so William (or any family) may or may not have been present at her passing. We may be pretty certain she died the the hospital itself, because the death certificate states very clearly that she lived within the actual boundaries of Norristown. Further, it is signed by Frances S. Cerra, D.O. of the Norristown State Hospital. I believe this name is typed erroneously, as it appears in the signature to have a middle initial of "A" and there is a living D.O. of that name.
Lillian died at 2:45 p.m. DST on August 29, 1985, and the certificate claims burial as happening the next day, which is a tad misleading as she was cremated by the Lansdale Crematorium. Arrangements, whatever they were, were handled by Holcombe Funeral Home who says that no services were held, and the ashes were returned to the family. In their records, "the family" is shown as Dorothy and William (two of her four children).
My grandmother Dorothy, her daughter, for her own death chose cremation and having her ashes scattered. Perhaps this choice was made for her mother Lillian as well. My suspicion is that my grandmother scattered Lilian's ashes in the woods near her home, as she is thought to have done with those of her sister.
The immediate causes of death were listed as "respiratory arrest due to medullary failure, due to pneumonia". The pneumonia was listed as having occurred within days of death, while medullary failure and respiratory arrest were listed as occurring within minutes of her death. I am no expert, but have been able to piece together that if the medulla (which governs breathing) fails, the person stops breathing. How this would connect with pneumonia I do not understand. If you have pneumonia and respiratory arrest, why the medulla would be involved is beyond me. All I can tell you is that the lady was age 87 and institutionalized, and she may have been very glad to go. We can only hope that Lillian found the peace that seems to have eluded her for most of her life.
The lady lost her father, worked and married young, miscarried several children, lost one young child, blew up her marriage, had a poor second marriage, and lost two of her adult children who died before her own passing in a state hospital. There is also a vague family story about her falling from a tractor or horse drawn hay rake, and being dragged for a considerable distance, and when this happened or whether it had any bearing on her mental status is not known. Her life was a train wreck, as surely as the one that killed her daddy when she was 6. The living, who mostly did not know her well personally, heard difficult stories about her and remember her as making their own parents' marriages difficult. She is not well-loved in memory, but I find myself having a lot of sympathy for her anyway.
Research note: Holcombe Funeral Home handled her ashes giving them to family, whom they have as her children Dorothy and William, but no living family descendants know where the ashes were placed or scattered.
My great grandmother, daughter of Ida T Wenhold and Lewis S Garner. She may have been named after her father's little sister. Her father was killed in a train mishap near Flourtown when she was about age 6. Her mother survived by doing housework and taking in laundry while sending the children out to work at young ages. Lillian began working at 13.
She was 15 when she eloped with William Franklin Jenkins, escaping a life of toiling in a rope factory. By age 16 she was a mother, and by 23 she had had several miscarriages, one child who died, while four lived to adulthood. Her husband worked long hours as a painter and trapper. Beyond his income, his sole contribution to the household was to chop wood, while she did the rest, which included cooking on a wood stove, hauling water for cooking and baths, and manually scrubbing clothes on a washboard. She was a quintessential Pennsylvania Dutch housekeeper with a sparkling home. In her rare free time in the evenings, after her work was done and before her husband would come home, she would swing on a tree-hanging swing. Their marriage finally was made official at the end of 1925 when she was 27, 12 years after their elopement. It was to last no more than five more years. In retrospect I wonder if the marriage were an attempt by her husband to solidify a relationship he may have known was fraying. Or was it one he frayed himself? The 1940 census shows William and his new family, and his daughter Ida is shown as being born about 1923, and son Gerald in 1927 - so the ages of these kids needs to be checked before further assigning motivations. But...
The image of Lillian on a swing became a metaphor for her life. By the 1930 census, she is with another man, Harold P. McBride from New York state, aka "Harry" with whom she had no known children, and from whom she was later separated. On the census she is using his last name, but it seems she kept or reverted to her first married name, as shown in a 1944 family baby book where she is referred to as Granny Jenkins. This makes sense in that her divorce from her husband William did not take place officially until 1947, by which time she'd long ago parted with Harry McBride, and her children had grown. So she and Harry were common law spouses at best.
One of her offspring was my grandmother, Dorothy Ida Jenkins Storkey. Lillian would give Dorothy the middle name of Ida, after her own mother.
It is hard to know what to think of Lillian. Her life had been hard, yet some of her later difficulties were apparently brought upon herself. If an account by her daughter, my grandmother, can be believed, Lillian strayed from her marriage. It seems her husband did continue to support her and the children, right up until he learned that another man was living under the roof he was paying for. Upon his telling her to have Harry move out, Lillian responded "If he goes, I go" and go they both did.
After that, her life and the lives of her children were difficult and scattered, her children shuttling between her home with Harry and her ex-husband's home with a new companion named Lena who had many children of her own and of her first deceased husband's as well. Lillian's son William ended up mostly with his grandmother, while the girls Alice and Lillian went mostly between the parents, and my grandmother Dorothy was also sent packing. My grandmother recalls being left with family and family friends as well, on several occasions not warned in advance. She also went to various relatives, including some of Harry's family in Connecticut.
I don't know if we'll ever find a lot more out about Harold, so let's give him a good paragraph here. Harold was the son of Robert J and Edith C McBride, seen on the 1910 census in Brooklyn, Kings County, New York. Early on, in 1920, he's in the Virgin Islands as a sailor. Somewhere along the line he must have found his way to Pennsylvania and met Lillian. Bearing in mind that Lillian was a rather difficult person who also had four children, one is tempted to think he must have been a man of much forbearance to have stepped up to the plate in loving her, and pitching in to try to raise those kids. The record left by my grandma does not tell if he were a successful stepfather, and indeed, her writings refer to him very little at all. The only impression left is that as a girl seeking her mom's attention, my young grandmother seemed to feel he was in the way. There's no date known for when Lillian and Harold went their separate ways. On the 1930 census the two are together living in Lansdale Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. By the 1940 census, Harold McBride is back in Brooklyn, King's County, New York, now at 584-A Halsey. It must be him; his age is right and he is a New York born longshoreman. His wife Betty was born in Maine and they have a daughter, Fay, born about 1931, whose birthplace is Pennsylvania. (Hauntingly, his new wife is only 4 years older than my grandma, his stepdaughter. Doing the math, 26 year old Betty must have been age 17 when she had Fay, and it's hard not to wonder about Harry's attraction to younger women when he had three young stepdaughters, though it is unfair to cast aspersions on his character.) Further, going back to Harry's new family on 1940's census, Harry reports they were living in the same home in 1935, so clearly between their daughter Fay's birth 9 years ago in Pennsylvania and this declaration of being in the same home in 1935, the couple has been settled for five to nine years, or 1931 at the earliest. "The Harry Years" for my great grandma Lillian may not have been many. Even if she commenced with Harry right after her 1925 marriage formalization with William Jenkins, the maximum time together with Harry would have been 1925 to 1931, or six years, and it was possibly even less than that. Still, in working the timeline, it does seem like Harry and his extended family was in touch after Lillian and Harold broke up. A family member born in 1944 has a baby book recording a present from "Mrs. McBride". It's possible that this is Harry's wife or his mother who was still alive for the 1940 census, then age 62.
After Harry was out of the picture, Lillian had several apartments and the children mostly stayed with her, though my grandmother was often out of town with relatives, finally returning home at Lillian's request when Lillian had secured a new home and had all the kids there together. My grandmother had left Washington DC for this request after a failed young love, but would meet my grandpa and marry in late 1937, so clearly Lillian's "new home" for her and her now-adult children was a bit before 1937.
Eventually the kids grew up and had their own families. For a time, Lillian lived with various amongst them. It's remembered at one place she somehow set her little room on fire. She'd not said anything, but a family member noticed that she'd came out for her third glass of water in a minute. No harm done. It finally got to the point where family found it impossible to care for her, and she apparently lived out the rest of her life in a hospital. She's remembered as a tiny woman who complained constantly that she was in pain. Family lore is that when she died she was found to have had a perforated ulcer and really had been in pain, but it does not seem to have been her cause of death.
A perforated ulcer is basically an ulcer that hasn't been treated and has burned through a wall. Before they perforate, peptic ulcers (often caused by the Helicobacter pylori bacteria) themselves are extremely painful and happen in the stomach or the duodenum (the first part of the small intestine, just after the stomach). Gastrointestinal bleeding is the most common complication, and sudden large bleeding can be life-threatening when the ulcer erodes one of the blood vessels.
Once a peptic ulcer has moved into being a perforated ulcer worse things can happen. One consequence is spilling of the stomach or intestinal contents into the abdomen. If the perforation is in the front of the stomach it may lead to acute peritonitis (inflammation of the peritoneum, the thin tissue lining the abdomen and the organs) which is intensely painful. If the perforation is at the rear, there may be bleeding from the gastroduodenal artery. In any case, the perforation can move into adjacent organs like the liver or pancreas. Because of the seriousness, perforated ulcers are one of the few conditions where surgery is done on an ulcer as it may be life threatening. Whether it got her in the end or not, and it seems not to have done so, it probably made her life very difficult.
I don't know how much of Lillian's years of erratic behavior were the result of her circumstances in losing her father, working as a child and eloping at 15, and having miscarriages, nor how much sprang from an unhappy mind. I do know that her unsettled life led my grandmother to have feelings of abandonment from her childhood that she carried all her life. Still, my grandmother also carried happy memories of her mother as well, of her impeccable housekeeping, of her tiny beauty, of black hair that hung to her waist that she wore piled high upon her head, of her dark eyes, and of her swinging alone in that tree swing on quiet evenings when all her housework was done.
______________________________________
Death certificate data: From her death certificate, we finally get Lillian's exact dates of birth and death as reflected above. An inpatient at Norristown State Hospital, she was listed as "Lillian Garner Jenkins" and as widowed. Her parents are correctly listed, and she is shown as having been born in Lansdale, Montgomery County, which will need to be checked as it seems at odds with what we know.
Her informant was William F. Jenkins, presumably her son who had the same name as his father. (Lillian's ex-husband William was deceased by the time of Lillian's death.) In handling this information and talking with the funeral home, I learned that "the informant" is not the person reporting the death, but the person giving information about the deceased for the death certificate, so William (or any family) may or may not have been present at her passing. We may be pretty certain she died the the hospital itself, because the death certificate states very clearly that she lived within the actual boundaries of Norristown. Further, it is signed by Frances S. Cerra, D.O. of the Norristown State Hospital. I believe this name is typed erroneously, as it appears in the signature to have a middle initial of "A" and there is a living D.O. of that name.
Lillian died at 2:45 p.m. DST on August 29, 1985, and the certificate claims burial as happening the next day, which is a tad misleading as she was cremated by the Lansdale Crematorium. Arrangements, whatever they were, were handled by Holcombe Funeral Home who says that no services were held, and the ashes were returned to the family. In their records, "the family" is shown as Dorothy and William (two of her four children).
My grandmother Dorothy, her daughter, for her own death chose cremation and having her ashes scattered. Perhaps this choice was made for her mother Lillian as well. My suspicion is that my grandmother scattered Lilian's ashes in the woods near her home, as she is thought to have done with those of her sister.
The immediate causes of death were listed as "respiratory arrest due to medullary failure, due to pneumonia". The pneumonia was listed as having occurred within days of death, while medullary failure and respiratory arrest were listed as occurring within minutes of her death. I am no expert, but have been able to piece together that if the medulla (which governs breathing) fails, the person stops breathing. How this would connect with pneumonia I do not understand. If you have pneumonia and respiratory arrest, why the medulla would be involved is beyond me. All I can tell you is that the lady was age 87 and institutionalized, and she may have been very glad to go. We can only hope that Lillian found the peace that seems to have eluded her for most of her life.
The lady lost her father, worked and married young, miscarried several children, lost one young child, blew up her marriage, had a poor second marriage, and lost two of her adult children who died before her own passing in a state hospital. There is also a vague family story about her falling from a tractor or horse drawn hay rake, and being dragged for a considerable distance, and when this happened or whether it had any bearing on her mental status is not known. Her life was a train wreck, as surely as the one that killed her daddy when she was 6. The living, who mostly did not know her well personally, heard difficult stories about her and remember her as making their own parents' marriages difficult. She is not well-loved in memory, but I find myself having a lot of sympathy for her anyway.
Research note: Holcombe Funeral Home handled her ashes giving them to family, whom they have as her children Dorothy and William, but no living family descendants know where the ashes were placed or scattered.
She was 15 when she eloped with William Franklin Jenkins, escaping a life of toiling in a rope factory. By age 16 she was a mother, and by 23 she had had several miscarriages, one child who died, while four lived to adulthood. Her husband worked long hours as a painter and trapper. Beyond his income, his sole contribution to the household was to chop wood, while she did the rest, which included cooking on a wood stove, hauling water for cooking and baths, and manually scrubbing clothes on a washboard. She was a quintessential Pennsylvania Dutch housekeeper with a sparkling home. In her rare free time in the evenings, after her work was done and before her husband would come home, she would swing on a tree-hanging swing. Their marriage finally was made official at the end of 1925 when she was 27, 12 years after their elopement. It was to last no more than five more years. In retrospect I wonder if the marriage were an attempt by her husband to solidify a relationship he may have known was fraying. Or was it one he frayed himself? The 1940 census shows William and his new family, and his daughter Ida is shown as being born about 1923, and son Gerald in 1927 - so the ages of these kids needs to be checked before further assigning motivations. But...
The image of Lillian on a swing became a metaphor for her life. By the 1930 census, she is with another man, Harold P. McBride from New York state, aka "Harry" with whom she had no known children, and from whom she was later separated. On the census she is using his last name, but it seems she kept or reverted to her first married name, as shown in a 1944 family baby book where she is referred to as Granny Jenkins. This makes sense in that her divorce from her husband William did not take place officially until 1947, by which time she'd long ago parted with Harry McBride, and her children had grown. So she and Harry were common law spouses at best.
One of her offspring was my grandmother, Dorothy Ida Jenkins Storkey. Lillian would give Dorothy the middle name of Ida, after her own mother.
It is hard to know what to think of Lillian. Her life had been hard, yet some of her later difficulties were apparently brought upon herself. If an account by her daughter, my grandmother, can be believed, Lillian strayed from her marriage. It seems her husband did continue to support her and the children, right up until he learned that another man was living under the roof he was paying for. Upon his telling her to have Harry move out, Lillian responded "If he goes, I go" and go they both did.
After that, her life and the lives of her children were difficult and scattered, her children shuttling between her home with Harry and her ex-husband's home with a new companion named Lena who had many children of her own and of her first deceased husband's as well. Lillian's son William ended up mostly with his grandmother, while the girls Alice and Lillian went mostly between the parents, and my grandmother Dorothy was also sent packing. My grandmother recalls being left with family and family friends as well, on several occasions not warned in advance. She also went to various relatives, including some of Harry's family in Connecticut.
I don't know if we'll ever find a lot more out about Harold, so let's give him a good paragraph here. Harold was the son of Robert J and Edith C McBride, seen on the 1910 census in Brooklyn, Kings County, New York. Early on, in 1920, he's in the Virgin Islands as a sailor. Somewhere along the line he must have found his way to Pennsylvania and met Lillian. Bearing in mind that Lillian was a rather difficult person who also had four children, one is tempted to think he must have been a man of much forbearance to have stepped up to the plate in loving her, and pitching in to try to raise those kids. The record left by my grandma does not tell if he were a successful stepfather, and indeed, her writings refer to him very little at all. The only impression left is that as a girl seeking her mom's attention, my young grandmother seemed to feel he was in the way. There's no date known for when Lillian and Harold went their separate ways. On the 1930 census the two are together living in Lansdale Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. By the 1940 census, Harold McBride is back in Brooklyn, King's County, New York, now at 584-A Halsey. It must be him; his age is right and he is a New York born longshoreman. His wife Betty was born in Maine and they have a daughter, Fay, born about 1931, whose birthplace is Pennsylvania. (Hauntingly, his new wife is only 4 years older than my grandma, his stepdaughter. Doing the math, 26 year old Betty must have been age 17 when she had Fay, and it's hard not to wonder about Harry's attraction to younger women when he had three young stepdaughters, though it is unfair to cast aspersions on his character.) Further, going back to Harry's new family on 1940's census, Harry reports they were living in the same home in 1935, so clearly between their daughter Fay's birth 9 years ago in Pennsylvania and this declaration of being in the same home in 1935, the couple has been settled for five to nine years, or 1931 at the earliest. "The Harry Years" for my great grandma Lillian may not have been many. Even if she commenced with Harry right after her 1925 marriage formalization with William Jenkins, the maximum time together with Harry would have been 1925 to 1931, or six years, and it was possibly even less than that. Still, in working the timeline, it does seem like Harry and his extended family was in touch after Lillian and Harold broke up. A family member born in 1944 has a baby book recording a present from "Mrs. McBride". It's possible that this is Harry's wife or his mother who was still alive for the 1940 census, then age 62.
After Harry was out of the picture, Lillian had several apartments and the children mostly stayed with her, though my grandmother was often out of town with relatives, finally returning home at Lillian's request when Lillian had secured a new home and had all the kids there together. My grandmother had left Washington DC for this request after a failed young love, but would meet my grandpa and marry in late 1937, so clearly Lillian's "new home" for her and her now-adult children was a bit before 1937.
Eventually the kids grew up and had their own families. For a time, Lillian lived with various amongst them. It's remembered at one place she somehow set her little room on fire. She'd not said anything, but a family member noticed that she'd came out for her third glass of water in a minute. No harm done. It finally got to the point where family found it impossible to care for her, and she apparently lived out the rest of her life in a hospital. She's remembered as a tiny woman who complained constantly that she was in pain. Family lore is that when she died she was found to have had a perforated ulcer and really had been in pain, but it does not seem to have been her cause of death.
A perforated ulcer is basically an ulcer that hasn't been treated and has burned through a wall. Before they perforate, peptic ulcers (often caused by the Helicobacter pylori bacteria) themselves are extremely painful and happen in the stomach or the duodenum (the first part of the small intestine, just after the stomach). Gastrointestinal bleeding is the most common complication, and sudden large bleeding can be life-threatening when the ulcer erodes one of the blood vessels.
Once a peptic ulcer has moved into being a perforated ulcer worse things can happen. One consequence is spilling of the stomach or intestinal contents into the abdomen. If the perforation is in the front of the stomach it may lead to acute peritonitis (inflammation of the peritoneum, the thin tissue lining the abdomen and the organs) which is intensely painful. If the perforation is at the rear, there may be bleeding from the gastroduodenal artery. In any case, the perforation can move into adjacent organs like the liver or pancreas. Because of the seriousness, perforated ulcers are one of the few conditions where surgery is done on an ulcer as it may be life threatening. Whether it got her in the end or not, and it seems not to have done so, it probably made her life very difficult.
I don't know how much of Lillian's years of erratic behavior were the result of her circumstances in losing her father, working as a child and eloping at 15, and having miscarriages, nor how much sprang from an unhappy mind. I do know that her unsettled life led my grandmother to have feelings of abandonment from her childhood that she carried all her life. Still, my grandmother also carried happy memories of her mother as well, of her impeccable housekeeping, of her tiny beauty, of black hair that hung to her waist that she wore piled high upon her head, of her dark eyes, and of her swinging alone in that tree swing on quiet evenings when all her housework was done.
______________________________________
Death certificate data: From her death certificate, we finally get Lillian's exact dates of birth and death as reflected above. An inpatient at Norristown State Hospital, she was listed as "Lillian Garner Jenkins" and as widowed. Her parents are correctly listed, and she is shown as having been born in Lansdale, Montgomery County, which will need to be checked as it seems at odds with what we know.
Her informant was William F. Jenkins, presumably her son who had the same name as his father. (Lillian's ex-husband William was deceased by the time of Lillian's death.) In handling this information and talking with the funeral home, I learned that "the informant" is not the person reporting the death, but the person giving information about the deceased for the death certificate, so William (or any family) may or may not have been present at her passing. We may be pretty certain she died the the hospital itself, because the death certificate states very clearly that she lived within the actual boundaries of Norristown. Further, it is signed by Frances S. Cerra, D.O. of the Norristown State Hospital. I believe this name is typed erroneously, as it appears in the signature to have a middle initial of "A" and there is a living D.O. of that name.
Lillian died at 2:45 p.m. DST on August 29, 1985, and the certificate claims burial as happening the next day, which is a tad misleading as she was cremated by the Lansdale Crematorium. Arrangements, whatever they were, were handled by Holcombe Funeral Home who says that no services were held, and the ashes were returned to the family. In their records, "the family" is shown as Dorothy and William (two of her four children).
My grandmother Dorothy, her daughter, for her own death chose cremation and having her ashes scattered. Perhaps this choice was made for her mother Lillian as well. My suspicion is that my grandmother scattered Lilian's ashes in the woods near her home, as she is thought to have done with those of her sister.
The immediate causes of death were listed as "respiratory arrest due to medullary failure, due to pneumonia". The pneumonia was listed as having occurred within days of death, while medullary failure and respiratory arrest were listed as occurring within minutes of her death. I am no expert, but have been able to piece together that if the medulla (which governs breathing) fails, the person stops breathing. How this would connect with pneumonia I do not understand. If you have pneumonia and respiratory arrest, why the medulla would be involved is beyond me. All I can tell you is that the lady was age 87 and institutionalized, and she may have been very glad to go. We can only hope that Lillian found the peace that seems to have eluded her for most of her life.
The lady lost her father, worked and married young, miscarried several children, lost one young child, blew up her marriage, had a poor second marriage, and lost two of her adult children who died before her own passing in a state hospital. There is also a vague family story about her falling from a tractor or horse drawn hay rake, and being dragged for a considerable distance, and when this happened or whether it had any bearing on her mental status is not known. Her life was a train wreck, as surely as the one that killed her daddy when she was 6. The living, who mostly did not know her well personally, heard difficult stories about her and remember her as making their own parents' marriages difficult. She is not well-loved in memory, but I find myself having a lot of sympathy for her anyway.
Research note: Holcombe Funeral Home handled her ashes giving them to family, whom they have as her children Dorothy and William, but no living family descendants know where the ashes were placed or scattered.
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