Deadlines and discoveries

 

Deadlines are wonderful things, looming there on the horizon getting ever closer. They provide impetus for getting words on the page and, in some cases, can be the inspiration which provides a topic for a piece, an article, a book. Whatever the work, deadlines push creativity. Which was why I chose to sign up for the more advanced family history writers' retreat in January, the one where we are supposed to have 5000 words of our manuscript written before the retreat begins.

I had about 700 words to begin with. So, a significant amount of words needed to appear on the page to meet the January deadline. It wouldn't be that difficult though if those were the only words to be produced but they aren't. Then I discovered writing sprints, Zoom meetings where writers get together to commit time, usually an hour, to their writing. The sprints were doing wonders for my fictional writing, a novel being one of my other projects. If I committed to enough sprints, I should be able to alternate between the novel and the 5000 words of narrative non-fiction about my ancestor.

Writing sprints work well for fiction where you can make things up as you go along. I discovered that narrative non-fiction is a different story. I was able to write part of the ongoing narrative but there were a lot of blank spaces where specific facts need to be looked up and whole passages which required research. Added to that, the facts and research sources needed to be noted to make my family story a useful family history source. Looks like this will take longer than I thought but, without a deadline to work towards, it would take infinitely longer.

Ancestral 1918 flu research with limited resources

 Harold Chamber's marriage certificate

Since our own pandemic has changed our lives, I've become increasingly interested in how the previous great granddaddy of pandemics, the 1918 flu, affected my ancestors. As my focus for this series of posts is the Chambers family, I'm going to start with what happened to Harold Strange Chambers in the relevant time period, 1918 - 1919 when the worst of the flu pandemic was taking its toll on the world's population.

The time between 1918 and 1919, saw a lot of movement of people due to the war effort, movement that helped to spread the disease. The origin of the pandemic is still a matter for debate. Did it originate with US soldiers from Kansas when America joined the war effort or was it brought in with Chinese recruits who joined the Chinese Labour Corps? Current wisdom doesn't put much stock in the theory that soldiers returning from Europe were the original spreaders of the disease, those troop movements were just a later way that the pandemic was able to infect wider swaths of people. Most of the literature, however, points to troops of soldiers as the most proficient spreaders of the disease. While airmen died from the disease, their movements from Canada to England didn't seem to be a major factor in disseminating the flu.

In 1917 and 1918, Canada, specifically Ontario, became a training ground for allied airmen. One such training facility was Camp Borden but there were other training camps set up as well. As Harold Chambers was recruited by the Royal Flying Corps and remained in Ontario, it appears that he was attached as support to one of these training facilities which would fit in well with the dates that he served, which were between 12 October, 1917 and 28 March, 1919. Nothing that I have read to date indicates that the flu was a major problem in those training camps. But the flu was in Ontario and caused many cities and towns to close down public gathering places which would have affected the times that Harold and his fellow recruits had for leisure.

Harold came from Regina to join up and he went back there at least once while he was stationed in Ontario. That was for his wedding which took place on June 10, 1918. The flu had been spreading by that point but it wasn't a major concern. It wasn't until after that in the autumn of 1918 that it gained steam and became a pandemic.

When he was released from his service on March 28, 1919, it was shortly after The Leader-Post of 8 November, 1918 had reported that flu cases were declining. Did that ease Harold's worries as he made his way back to Regina and his bride? It seems as though that report was a bit premature as the Saskatoon Daily Star reported on 21 Feb 1920 that Regina's influenza epidemic was under control but perhaps this epidemic was the regular winter malady rather than a remnant of the pandemic that had swept around the world and the Regina that Harold Chambers returned to was relatively safe from the pandemic when he returned after he was discharged.  

 

Sources:

Flu research in Ontario https://www.oise.utoronto.ca/oise/News/2020/The_1918_flu_pandemic_and_education_in_Ontario.html

Flu research in Saskatchewan  https://www.saskarchives.com/collections/exhibits/spanish-flu-saskatchewan

 Journal of the Canadian Historical Association. “The Horror at Home: The Canadian Military and the “Great” Influenza Pandemic of 1918” by Mark Osborne Humphries https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/jcha/2005-v16-n1-jcha1706/015733ar.pdf

RAF (and Royal Flying Corps) training - https://www.warmuseum.ca/learn/dispatches/into-the-blue-pilot-training-in-canada-1917-18/#tabs

Saskatoon Daily Star, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan 21 Feb 1920 page 3 Newspapers.com

The Leader-Post, Regina Saskatchewan, 8 Nov 1918, Fri page 9 – Newspapers.com