No relatives were lost that I know about but my grandmother, who was living in London then, once mentioned how ill she was but still had to nurse my grandfather and my mother, who would have been around four years old.

She had to drag herself upstairs to the bedrooms, sitting on the steps and going up one rise at a time.

This influenza was so deadly that it would kill you within a day or two, targeting the ages 21-29 . The healthy young people were the most vulnerable. My husband's grandfather became sick on a Tuesday night and died Friday morning from what they called pneumonia from the flu. That was how this strain killed....it turned the lungs blue and drowned the victims in their own fluids. Horrendous.

Vee.....what a true hero. A heart-warming story.

The program did in fact mentioned that the loss of life was greater than all the wars in that century. And was , as I wrote, rarely spoken of or recalled afterward. The memory of the horror was such that humanity had to delete and go forward. Probably not unlike our war heroes who never spoke of what happened. My uncle was on the USS Iowa and saw much action during WWII, yet never spoke of it until his last years of life when he would weep at the memories.

My daughter and I are just home from watching Dunkirk. She thought it began slowly, but I liked the whole thing. Watching those small private vessels heading out to rescue the men was quite emotional.

The mother of one of my mother's cousins died of the 1918 flu. Said cousin was eight and was raised by her grandparents, her father having succumbed to something I've forgotten at the beginning of his army service, a disease, not from battle.

My uncles never spoke of their WWII experiences, either. After the youngest of them died, his wife and daughter said that he had never uttered a single word about his service activities.

Not everyone forgot it.

My mother who was born in 1928 told me what she knew about the flu epidemic. I am not aware of any of my family members dying in it, so I believe it did not have a personal connection for her.

To make this a bit less off topic, I will mention an interesting book I read on this very subject, The Great Influenza by John Barry, a very thorough treatment. It was recommended by someone else on this forum, but I don't remember now who that was.

I also enjoyed The Ghost Map by Stephen Johnson, a book about London's great cholera epidemic in 1854. I've always been intrigued by the influence of epidemic disease on history. I suspect it is as important a factor as war.

Yes, my great aunt Robbie died from that flu in 1918. She lived in Blossom, Texas. I don't know any details. I wish I had asked my grandmother about it. I checked out the cemetery (online) and lots of people in Blossom died in 1918.

Amy, you would probably find the PBS program on the 1918 Influenza very enlightening.

I would love to see it, yoyobon. I'm going to look for it.

My grandmother's niece died of that flu. Grandma was the youngest or next to youngest of a large family. AFAIK, her niece was the only one of the family who succumbed to the flu.

600,000 people died in the US alone........30-40 million worldwide.

My grandfather had the flu in 1918 and reportedly "almost died" from it. He was born in 1899 and so would have been 19 at the time. I don't know any details because when I learned of it, I was young and dumb and apparently not interested enough to ask questions. (I hate to admit that.)

The ages 20-29 were the ones likely to get it and to die.

It attacked the healthiest young people, theories have been offered that hearty immune systems turned against the body/lungs.

I happen to enjoy lurking around old cemeteries to see who's there etc., and there is a tiny cemetery on the way to one of our research sites. It's probably the same size as your average lawn in a house, and the cemetery has probably six rows of crosses with about 8 in each row. One row is taken up by an entire family who were decimated by the flu epidemic - everyone from infants to grandparents were taken in that event, and I think only a couple survived. The flu virus was definitely worldwide, as back in 1918 around "these here parts", it was still pioneer country (wagons, sodhouses etc.) and there must have been a dearth of medical care. It was pretty sad to see the family name repeated over and over on the graveyard crosses.

A few years ago I heard that some tissue samples taken in 1918 had been preserved, and scientists today were able to identify that the virus was H1N1, and it originated in swine. I've also heard what Yoyobon said - that it was worst for people with the strongest immune systems, particularly in the second wave. Usually flu is worst for the very young and the very old, or those who are already ill. It made two distinct passes through the population. One pass worked one way, the other worked the other way.

I myself started getting flu shots only a few years ago because I only ever had the flu once in my adult life. When I approached 60 I figured it was time. Just yesterday I got the first pneumonia vaccine. There is a complementary one covering other forms of pneumonia given a year later. Thinking over the fact that many flu victims actually die of pneumonia, it seemed like a good idea. Going to get the new shingles vaccine when it comes out, too, as the old one is less effective (though better than nothing). Rouan's and my father had a nasty case of shingles. I don't want to go through that if I can avoid it! I'm not expecting to live forever, but I very much hope to stay healthy as long as I do live!

rosefolly...those are really important steps to take to avoid being unnecessarily ravaged by illnesses that can weaken us and set us up for worse . I think we find that we don't rebound from illnesses like in our youth.

Here's the latest research on the 1918 pandemic from the CDC :

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/1918flupandemic.htm

My great grandfather seems to have "disappeared" around 1918. The last record I find of him is his WWI draft registration, when he was about 42 yo. In the 1920 census, my gr-grandmother is listed as married, but he is not there, nor in any other record after 1918; in subsequent records she is a "widow".

He was a butcher and a peddler of sorts, who sold/delivered groceries. My grandmother's last memory of him was saying goodbye as he was departing for some kind of trip -- not clear if on his regular route, or a buying trip, or to visit relatives -- she said she didn't remember. But she also said she was a few years younger than she would have been 1918.

I've wondered if he fell victim to the flu somewhere and somehow was unidentified. Of course there could have been some other reason, but the timing is suspect.

Raee, it is interesting trying to do reverse detective work on the family tree. My mother told me that a great uncle of hers went off to the Alaska Gold Rush and was never heard from again. So many who went there died and she assumed that was what happened to him. However I heard recently from an unknown relative in western Canada whose connection to me was from about that time. She did not know of a Gold Rush connection, but I think it is possible that he headed out there and got distracted by a pretty face and a job opportunity. I like to think so, anyway. And I wish my mother were still around to hear that possibility.

I took another look at the family tree just now. Absolutely no deaths in 1918, so apparently my family was spared. They all lived in rural northern New England or maritime Canada, so perhaps those were areas where the influenza was less prevalent. Or maybe it passed through there on the first, milder wave. Does anyone know?

Not the 1918 epidemic but I had a great uncle who died in 1920 from influenza at the age of 20. He lived in a very rural area of west central Wisconsin.

Perhaps it made a difference if one lived in the country, as opposed to the crowded cities. My ancestors at that time were all living in rural areas, and I don't think a single one got that form of the influenza. Just a thought.

One tiny town in the western US decided to quarantine their town since by then the pandemic was raging and there seemed to be danger in leaving or coming in.

However, the flu came anyway....via the postman and mail delivery. There was speculation that perhaps the postman was a carrier ( no pun intended).

This from research :

The first wave of the 1918 pandemic occurred in the spring and was generally mild. The sick, who experienced such typical flu symptoms as chills, fever and fatigue, usually recovered after several days, and the number of reported deaths was low. However, a second, highly contagious wave of influenza appeared with a vengeance in the fall of that same year. Victims died within hours or days of their symptoms appearing, their skin turning blue and their lungs filling with fluid that caused them to suffocate. In just one year, 1918, the average life expectancy in America plummeted by a dozen years.

It’s unknown exactly where the particular strain of influenza that caused the pandemic came from; however, the 1918 flu was first observed in Europe, America and areas of Asia before spreading to almost every other part of the planet within a matter of months. Despite the fact that the 1918 flu wasn’t isolated to one place, it became known around the world as the Spanish flu, as Spain was one of the earliest countries to be hit hard by the disease. Even Spain’s king, Alfonso XIII (1886-1931), contracted the flu.

One unusual aspect of the 1918 flu was that it struck down many previously healthy, young people–a group normally resistant to this type of infectious illness–including a number of World War I (1914-18) servicemen. In fact, journalist Gina Kolata has reported that more U.S. soldiers died from the 1918 flu than were killed in battle during the war. Forty percent of the U.S. Navy was hit with the flu, while 36 percent of the Army became ill, notes Kolata in her book on the subject.

Although the death toll attributed to the 1918 flu is often estimated at 20 million to 50 million victims worldwide, other estimates run as high as 100 million victims. The exact numbers are impossible to know due to a lack of medical record-keeping in many places. What is known, however, is that few locations were immune to the 1918 flu–in America, victims ranged from residents of major cities to those of remote Alaskan communities. Even President Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) reportedly contracted the flu in early 1919 while negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I.

My grandmother lost her two little boys to the flu. My aunt and mother were born a few years later in 1920 and 1921. One of my brothers is named after the boys who died of the flu.

When I first moved to rural West Virginia in the 1970s we had a neighbor, then about 70, who remembered the 1918 flu. He and his father used to go from farm to farm where people were sick. They cut the fences so the livestock could get to water and fend for themselves. They built up fires, carried out the dead (and laid them on the porch), and did their best to feed the living. He said sometimes they found entire families dead.

So far as I know, none of my own family died in the 1918 flu epidemic (like Rosefolly, they were in rural New England). However, I've been working on a family tree for one of my oldest friends, and we discovered that three of her grandmother's sisters (there were 8 living siblings at the time) died in October 1918 within days of each other. They were living in Philadelphia at the time. Her grandmother had never spoken of it. Horrifying.