A few days ago I was reading a compiled genealogy that speculated about an epidemic. It is a quite reasonable speculation. Several members of an extended family as well as some neighbors all died in the space of a few weeks. What the contagion was, or even if the speculation is correct at all, may turn out to be unknowable. It was a frontier area, and the records implying death seem to be, at least in part, probate records, which will not give the cause of death.
In other research, I’ve found outbreaks of typhoid, and “red fever,” a disease once used as a cause of death in Sweden that is now known to correspond to any one of several highly contagious fevers. Researching one of my own ancestors revealed that he had lost two families; both times in the space of a few days. The first to a combination of meningitis and malaria, the second to scarlet fever. When we find many family members that die close to one another, disease is an obvious suspect. It isn’t the only one.
More recently I’ve been reading an obscure Chicago newspaper from the early 1900s. I’ve been looking for anything to explain a man’s disappearance. Crime, bigamy, divorce, and death don’t generally make up my favorite reading, but they could all explain the shattering of a family. There is one thing that probably is not related to my disappearing man, but I keep reading it, over and over—families being found dead. The reason was not disease. The reason was their lighting. Gas lighting to be specific.
Today when we think of gas being piped into our homes, we are thinking of natural gas, methane, a hydrocarbon. The main risk is that in case of a leak, there could be an explosion. So that we have a chance to notice those leaks, a tiny amount of another gas with a terrible smell is added. When those newspapers were written, the gas was not natural gas, it was almost certainly a form of carburetted water gas. Water gas was produced by passing steam through superheated coal. For any chemistry fans, the reaction is-
H2O + C -> H2 + CO
If you aren’t a chemistry fan, CO, is a very bad thing. It is carbon monoxide. It burns well, and combined with H2 (hydrogen gas) and small hydrocarbons (the “carburetted” part of the name of the gas) it was useful for cooking and lighting. If water gas went unburned, if it leaked into the room instead of providing light, it caused confusion, fainting, and, fairly quickly, death. Before my last few days of reading, if I saw several family members with very similar death dates, I would have thought of disease, or perhaps fire. Now, if those deaths occurred in a city, in the age of gaslight, I will think of something else as well.