Grisly Ends & Shocking Finales

Just curious if anyone has dug up any unfortunate or unnatural endings for their ancestors, or if it's just my crazy tree. Of the various demises I've managed to verify in my extended family they are being gored to death by a billy goat, suffocated by a trench cave in, hanged by Tories, being beaten to death by a jealous neighbor with a fence rail, hanged in Bacon's Rebellion, killed by Indians, multiple Civil War deaths including dying in a Civil War POW camp, WWII, shot by a jealous boyfriend, being drawn and quartered for picking the wrong side in the War of the Roses, being run over by a transfer truck, drag racing and subsequent crash and most recently suicide by being run over by a train. The last was a great grandfather who got in a fight with his 5th wife, wrote out his will and went out to sit on the train tracks until the train showed up. Our whole family had always thought it was an accident until I started digging around. And when you find out these things do you share them and/or does the family get upset?

I have one that died in a house fire. Another died of (possibly) dysentery just three months shy of the end of the Civil War. I think there's rumor of one having been killed by Indians. The rest died of disease (cancer, heart disease, etc) or old age. There was one drowning. He was 11. That was shocking and sad. Especially since I've probably driven by the river crossing multiple times over the years and never knew there was a connection. Most of my family knows the strange deaths; and there's not really anyone (closely related) left alive to object or get upset.

I keep expecting to encounter something like that, but just about everyone dies of disease or old age. One poor two-year-old tumbled from his highchair; that's probably the saddest story, outside of some drownings and war dead. On my wife's side though, one of her ancestors wasn't quite all there; locked himself in his house and starved to death, or so the story goes.

I should do the statistics. Mine's a large extended family on both sides, and except for these dramatic sorts, most of them die peacefully of old age or heart disease.

>4 varielle: I have a family epidemiology spreadsheet! ( Why, yes, I am a librarian working in a medical library....why do you ask? LOL) I haven't updated it in ages. In looking at the spreadsheet, my 2G Grandmother died from ether poisoning while having surgery.

varielle, you have a very interesting family!

In addition to the usual old age, common diseases and auto accidents, my family has:
burned in a brush fire he had started
as he was pressing cider, the beam of the press fell on one side of his head and shoulder and wounded him so that he languished about half an hour and then died
3 accidental falls: from roof, carriage, haymow
accident: fell out of third story window, lived fifteen minutes after fall
killed accidently by a falling tree
accidentally crushed to death by the fall of an embankment of earth
dropped dead in harvest field
4 drownings
killed by Indians (1777)
murdered by servant (1756), murdered by a maniac (1856)
premature child birth or possible abortion (1855)
homicide: gunshot wound, liver, stomach, spleen
suicides - 1 carbolic acid, 1 potassium cyanide, 1 strychnine, and 4 self-inflicted gunshot
accidental opium poisoning
2 were hit by trains, not suicide
Also the usual malaria, yellow fever, diphtheria, childbirth, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, syphilis.

I don't worry too much about sharing the cause of death unless it is very recent and could be a source of embarrassment. About ten years ago I learned about an in-law's death by lethal injection. Recently a relative acknowledged this but I choose not to share details in that case.

On the sad side, one of my great-great-uncles died just about an hour before the Armistice in WWI.

died of exposure by wandering out of the house in the winter
2 died by pedestrian car accidents (decades apart)*
died by accidental fall, or maybe a tree fell on the older man
head injury led to a decade in the state (mental) hospital where he died
illness and/or dementia led to admittance to (different) state hospital, died two weeks later

I'm also reminded of some research I've recently done for a plane crash that was 50 years ago so the death certificates are now public. The plane landed short of the runway and then burst into flames. All of those who died were because of that, and not the crash itself.

*the woman had given birth to 14 children, lived through extreme poverty, was widowed with children still at home, and was finally enjoying a comfortable life in her son's home

I neglected to mention my 10th great uncle who got hanged as a witch in Salem, Mass.

As far as diseases go I've got apoplexy, typhoid, COPD complications from mustard gas exposure in WWI, wonky hearts, sketchy lungs, blood clots, the mysterious "found dead", dementia and the number one killer--childbirth.

>5 lesmel: lesmel, I need to make one of those spreadsheets, right now the documentation is scattered all over the place.

My grt-grt grandfather died in a house fire trying to save some children in the house. The 1894 newspaper article is very descriptive referring to him as a black lump that "did not look as if it had ever been a man."

Other interesting CODs in the family include "general paralysis of the insane" (syphilis) and "internal hemorrhage and fracture of skull - fell down stairs."

I share what I find. There's really not anyone close enough to the deceased to be upset.

My great, great uncle hung himself in jail. He was a Civil War veteran whose wife (my great, great aunt) had a child out of wedlock from an affair she had while he was away fighting. He could never forgive her and started drinking. His drinking led to altercations with her (they did not divorce, rather she gave the child away). His last fight with her landed him in jail, where after writing a scathing suicide note, he hung himself.

I have a distant cousin that was struck by lightning. Otherwise, it's the usual diseases, old age, and accidents.

My family is apparently quite accident prone, as various direct ancestors and distant cousins have died from:

- Gunshot wound while removing hunting rifle from brush pile (because that's where we stored our guns in the 1870s)
- Carbon monoxide poisoning while digging a well
- Car accident
- Smoke inhalation from a controlled burn pasture fire that got out of hand
- Thrown from a horse
- Killed by a falling tree (and his family felt the need to record this fact on his tombstone: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=pv&GRid=8882982&PIpi=14763...
- Runaway buggy
- Drowned in a flash flood
- House fire

Then of course there's all the usual suspects: TB, apoplexy, various cancers, pneumonia, heart problems, kidney problems, old age. And one branch of the family has an unusually high number of suicides. Depression runs strong on that side of the family.

The best COD I ever found isn't from my family, but from a book of coroner's inquests: a woman was killed when the outhouse blew over on her.

The child deaths are the saddest. I assign a special symbol to those entries so they stand out and they're everywhere, increasingly so the further back. And the further back in the tree, the more I'm given to imagining the enormous branch that could have spread out below them.

I just have a few:

--my mother's aunt died in a car accident (passenger), and the driver walked away unscathed.

--drowned on the Lady Elgin (ship on Lake Michigan that went down off the coast of Wilmette in 1860). Family story had a brother (drowned) and sister (survived) the sinking. I uncovered a third person related to the family, but my aunt didn't believe it, because she'd "never heard the story told in the family." She still didn't believe it, despite being shown this poor drowning victim's large tombstone on the family plot in Milwaukee, inscribed with "Lost on the Lady Elgin."

My husband had a g-grandfather who died in a mining accident the day before his daughter (my husband's grandmother) was born. The traveling priest came to their small town to do both the funeral and the baptism on the same day.

I have a cousin (reasonably distant) who was hanged at Tyburn for horse stealing. He had been in the Royal Marines but was turned on the beach by the Peace of Amiens (1804). He wasn't the only ex-serviceman to turn to crime at the time. Another cousin's patron provided character evidence, but Joseph must have run into a hanging judge. Normally he could have expected to be transported to NSW.

Another cousin was drowned after falling off a yardarm while serving in the Royal Navy (HMS Rattlesnake), and another drowned as a 2 year old in a mill-stream, the family being millers.

Just yesterday I found the death cert for a 1st cousin 2x removed; and the death cert says "body mangled in truck accident." I couldn't just leave it there. This morning, I found some newspaper articles about the crash. There's even a photo of the crash site. He was only 24.

I don't know much about the family deaths other than the one who jumped his horse off Wheeling hill while pursued by Native Americans, and a great-uncle who died at 10 in some sort of bicycle accident. Really morbidly curious about what exactly happened there, assuming hit by a vehicle, but who knows.

My Hilton forebear who built Hylton Castle was supposedly such a nasty piece of work that they cut off his legs after he died out of spite.

I have more than a few who died at sea (either when they were coming over in the 17th century, or as fishermen) and one that drowned in a river. Then, there's childbirth....

Yeah. My 25th Great (Paternal) Grandfather killed my 30th Great Uncle (from my Paternal Grandmother's line). My 25th Great Grandfather was then himself killed by my 31st Great Uncle, who was also from my Paternal Grandmother's line).

The thing is ... not one of them knew they were or would ever be in any way related.

My 25th Great Grandfather was English King Harold Godwinson (1022-1066).
My 30th Great Uncle was King Harald Hardradde of Norway (1015-1066)
My 31st Great Uncle was William the Conqueror (1021-1087)

Found dead in a closet
Found dead in a hotel room with a man who was not her husband
Suicide by Paris Green (had to look that one up)
Three children burned in a house when mother had gone to a store (found grave with all three dying on the same day)
Airplane crash

Murdered by husband (some stories say it was because he was drunk and supper wasn't ready on time; he killed her in front of their children)
That husband was found not guilty (after running away; his father used his clout with the governor to interfere with the trial; he was found not guilty, but was immediately lynched by an angry mob)--Sounds like a Lifetime movie, or some True Crime podcast, but it happened in the 1850s
Suicide after the loss of his wife--ate a poisoned cucumber on his wife's grave
Killed by Indians
Killed by lightning
Killed by a felled tree
Killed in a sawmill accident
Killed in mine
Childbirth
Run over while bike riding
Accidentally killed brother playing with a gun (about 14 years old)
Motorcycle accident
Appendicitis