My grandfathers’ family was wiped out in the storm of 1900, Galveston, Texas.
He, my grandfather Herbert, was one month shy of being 5 years old when the storm came. His mother, father, and all 4 siblings were killed.
His father was from Sweden and Herbert did not go there.
I don’t know anything about his mother- not even her name (yet. I’m working on that and should find out from two sources in the next few weeks).
He does not pop up again until 1920 when he is listed on a census as living as a border in another state. He met and married my grandmother who was living in that state in 1925.
Where did Herbert go between 1900 and, say, 1915.
Did his mother have family in the area? Did he go to some orphanage somewhere? Did another family take him in? What happened to orphans left after the storm?
All the old folks have died off and I have no clues. There is little family oral history as Herbert was just 5 and either didin’t remember much or didn’t tell the story.
Wow. Poor Herbert! Something similar happened to my granddad. His parents both died in the flu pandemic of 1918. He was taken in by other relatives and spent his childhood moving from family to family. (Side note: to his dying day, he always insisted that after his parents died, his mother would stand by his bed at night and sing him to sleep. That may be the sweetest ghost story I’ve ever heard.)
My WAG would be that he was taken in by his mother’s relatives or maybe another family. What an interesting mystery…
I have a cousin who was orphaned only a few months after being born. His mother had Hodgkin’s disease and died when he was two months old. His dad, who was a US soldier who was kept in this country while his wife was ill. After she died, with supreme military logic, she wasn’t ill, so he was sent to Europe, where he was killed in the Battle of the Bulge. His father’s family raised him, so I never saw much of him.
Baker that’s fucked up. IIRC from my service (1989-1994) being widowered with children was an automatic hardship discharge, unless the service member fought it.
For the OP, what records are you accessing? At the very least there had to have been some kind of survivor lists, considering your grandfather seems to have been sure who his family was, and how many siblings he’d had. It’s possible, of course, such records don’t exist anymore, but I would tend to view that as the least likely outcome.