Gertrude Ford Karl was born in February 1896 in Cleveland, Ohio. Her mom's name was Mary (maiden name unknown), and she was born in New York in October 1851. Gertrude's maternal grandfather was born in Scotland and her maternal grandmother in Ireland.

Gertrude had two older brothers, Frank (born January 1887 in New York) and Eugene (born April 1891, also in New York). Sometime between Eugene's birth and Gertrude's five years later, the family moved to Cleveland. She also had a little brother, Arthur, born in June 1898 in Cleveland. It is noted on the 1900 census sheet that Mary Ford had had eight children, only four of which (Gertrude and her three brothers) were still living.

Interestingly, on the 1900 Census sheet, the mom, Mary, is listed as the head of household-but she's also listed as being married, rather than widowed (it's a little difficult to read, but it looks like they got married in 1881). I have no idea where Gertrude's father was, and I know nothing about him other than that he too was born in New York state; he might have been in an infirmary, working elsewhere, or I suppose they might have been separated.

I will try to find evidence of the family in New York to see if I can find the father's name. I will also try to get a birth certificate for Gertrude now that I know where to look for it, and hopefully that will give us his name too. Finally, I will try to follow up on Gertrude's brothers to see if any of their families are still around, although that may take me a while.

Although I don't know yet when or where Gertrude married Jack, she moved to Youngstown in 1913; it's my current theory that they must have married in her hometown of Cleveland in 1913 (there is no record of their marriage in Mahoning County, which covers Youngstown) and then set up house in Youngstown. In 1913 Gertrude would have been only 17, which seems young to move to a different city on your own. Kitty Lou said Jack might easily have met her in Cleveland, as she recalls his family having lots of friends there-his sister Helen also had longtime friends in that city.

In Youngstown, Jack and Gertrude lived at 126 West Glenaven (or Glenhaven) Avenue; they rented, rather than owned, and there were other families living there, so I suspect it was a large house split up into multiple dwellings. Down the street from them at 177 W. Glenaven Avenue lived Jack's sister "Aunt Dell" and her husband Lou Ress, along with their son Karl.

On 29 September 1915, their son Leo Raymond Karl was born, and then two years later they had a daughter, Ann Rita, born 26 October 1917. A year after that is when Gertrude became ill. (Kitty Lou tells me that she was pregnant at the time.) She got the influenza on 23 October 1918, and six days later came down with bronchopneumonia; three days after that, she died at 3:30 a.m. on 1 November 1918.

I do not know how much any of you know about the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918. I did some research on the Internet and was quite taken aback with what I read. Estimates of the number who died worldwide range from 20 million to 40 million (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/influenza/timeline/index.html); a site by Stanford University (http://www.stanford.edu/group/virus/uda/) gave a number of 25 million killed worldwide in less than a year. In October 1918 alone, 195,000 Americans died from the influenza (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/influenza/maps/index.html ). It was also called "Spanish flu" because of the number of Spaniards who died from it; another common name for it was the grippe.

I have to say that according to what I read, it must not have been a very easy death, either for Gertrude or for Jack to watch and be helpless to do anything to ease her suffering; I can't imagine what that must have been like, especially with a three-year-old toddler and a one-year-old infant around the house. (After what I read, I understand a little better why he didn't remarry afterwards-it must have been a very emotionally scarring experience.) One interesting thing about her death certificate is that Jack was not the "informant"-the one who provides the information to the city official filling it out. Instead, it was his brother-in-law, Lou Ress (Aunt Dell's husband). My dad's and Kitty Lou's feeling is that he was most likely too devastated to be able to do so, plus of course he had the children to care for. No one ever heard that he had been sick as well, so that seems the most likely possibility to me too.

Gertrude Ford Karl was buried on 2 November 1918 in Calvary Cemetery in Youngstown, Ohio [that's what her death certificate says-I will try to contact the cemetery this week to confirm it]; she was only 22 years old. The last request in her husband Jack's will was that a tombstone be erected at her grave.

By the time of the 1920 census, about 14 months later, Jack is listed as a boarder at the same address that he & Gertrude had lived at, and living at Aunt Dell's down the road is herself, her husband, and her son; her nephew Leo; her sister Helen; and her father (Jack's father too) Philip. Two years after that, Jack entered Palmer Chiropractic College in Davenport, Iowa, and graduated a year and a half later, in July 1923 (this is the same chiropractor's school that his son Leo attended). While he and Gertrude were married, he was a sheet heater at the steel mill; at some point he attended St. Fidelis Seminary in Herman, Pennsylvania, for at least two years of college, and this must have been before he was married (he was born in Jan 1890 and thus six years older than his wife).