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| Death certificate of Forrest Shields |
I've resumed (briefly) some genealogical hunting and pecking in order to update my files, hopefully prior to some form of publication and an end to what I can do with this project.
Along the way I'm finding several records now online that were not available when last I searched, one of them being Indiana death certificates.
This one pictured, for my biological grandfather Forrest, adds new information to what my father had told me about the matter.
Briefly, the story I had heard from Dad was that his father Forrest had perished at the age of 49 from asphyxiation. He had pernicious anemia, and in an attempt to stay warm in some boarding house in which he was residing, he had sealed up the cracks and doorways and a faulty heater had then accidentally released carbon monoxide and killed him.
There was also some suspicion that because of Forrest's lifelong problem with alcohol that that had somehow been a factor.
The death certificate tells the medical side of the matter. Forrest perished, probably in his sleep, of heart failure caused by valvular heart disease and mitral valve prolapse (or insufficiency). His anemia damaged his heart valves, and the heart eventually failed. Alcohol probably accelerated matters.
I had also been under the impression that Forrest lived alone at the time of his passing, but it appears he instead lived with his mother Magnolia (who died some four years later in 1950). Forrest had not remarried after his divorce from my grandmother Thorne (he was her first husband). No address is listed on the death certificate, interestingly, although the obituary indicated he had perished at "his home on South Main," indicating that he lived in-town in Spencer.
The mystery resolves somewhat by looking at Magnolia's death certificate. On it, she is shown dying of "senility" while a resident of Hazel's Nursing Home on--yup--South Main Street. So what probably happened was that he and his mother Magnolia moved into something that may have billed itself as a "nursing home" that was probably something privately owned when Forrest's father Robert died in 1943. Proceeds from the sale of the farm probably allowed that. Magnolia lost her eyesight by the end of her life due to diabetes, Dad remarked once to me. In that case the mother and son had a relationship where each looked after the other and the boarding house becomes something more like a nursing home and perhaps partial boarding house.
One remembers that Dad was a very young man when he was recalled from his Navy service to deal with this matter. The story of an asphyxiation had to have begun with his grandmother Magnolia--no one else would have been alive to tell such a tale except Forrest's brother Earl (well, Minter was still alive but institutionalized). Dad probably never saw Forrest's death certificate and simply took his grandmother's word for what had happened.
Why she told such a story is unknown but it may be put down to senility. Because mitral valve insufficiency causes shortness of breath perhaps she erroneously connected two things together that were in actual fact not related. Forrest may have suffered serious breathing problems as the end neared; in fact, it's likely. But it was shortness of breath from a failing heart, not a failing heater. One wonders if a letter describing the event, in fact, confused "heart" with "heater." Who really knows.
One issue I still have with the certificate is that white box at upper right. I wonder what that is.
