Tidbits of the Past

I've been helping my daughter work on a family tree project for school these past few weeks. I did some genealogical work years ago and then it got shuffled into the "later" pile, but it's been fun working on it again. Now that the Historical Vital Statistics for Nova Scotia are accessible online, we've found quite a lot of information that I didn't have before.

I have to admit, I find it fascinating looking at the old death records. Not only have I found a lot of dates I didn't know previously, but I always have to satisfy my insatiable curiosity by looking at the "cause of death" section. Is that morbid, or only natural? I'm not certain.

My favorite entry of this sort so far has been for one of my husband's forbears. There were three things listed in the "cause of death" section (this was in 1944): it said

Heart (sudden)
Chronic nephritis
Frightened by a dog two weeks previously

"Frightened by a dog"--that's just such an excellent entry. Conjures up all kinds of images and stories for me. I'll bet there are hardly any entries these days with that kind of storytelling potential. ;-)