Cases from the Asylum Archive
Elizabeth “Lizzie” Walker Smith (1892-1948)
Robert C. Allen
The Historical as Personal
I have no interest in portraying victims or villains or in describing a homogeneous group of practitioners following some predetermined script. Instead, I strive to consider each case of miscarriage individually–Who was there? Why were they there? What happened? Why did it happen that way? I make no assumptions about the power of regular physicians had over their patients, or vice versa. Instead, I use these cases to expose the tricky negotiations carried out in the midst of a bloody and painful event.
–Shannon Withycombe, Lost: Miscarriage in Nineteenth Century America (p. 4)
At this point, we might make note of our marginalia and the questions our first reading of the form provokes. We now have enough information to search for Lizzie Walker Smith, her husband, her child/children?, her mother and family in genealogical resources.
One of advantages of conducting genealogical research in such online platforms as Ancestry.com or Family Search is the ability to organize search results in the form of a family tree. The search process involves entering as much basic information about a particular subject as possible into the search algorithm, selecting (and saving) relevant search returns, and incorporating them into family tree profile for each person. In Ancestry. Hint “leaves” appear in the corner of the profile, suggesting other sources for review and incorporation. The more data, the more likely there will be hints, the more the hints are accepted and incorporated into the profile, the more accurate and rich the hints, and so forth. In addition to the family tree view, Ancestry will produce a chronological time line for each person in the tree, organizing the data from birth to death, providing links to family members, and referencing the sources that have been used. The family tree can be shared with other Ancestry.com subscribers and downloaded from the site. It can be opened outside of Ancestry through any software or app that will recognize a GED (genealogical) file.
In my family history classes, I advise students with grandparents and great-grandparents in the U.S. to start with relatives who were living in 1940—the latest U.S. census enumeration available to the public. Information from that enumeration can help locate older family members and older generations in previous enumerations.
The 1900, 1920, 1930, and 1940 censuses helped me to sketch out Lizzie’s personal history and family relations.
Elizabeth Belle “Lizzie” Walker was born to farmers Frank Leslie Walker and Orphie E. Flowers on March 30, 1892 in Columbus County, North Carolina. She had two younger siblings. She married Robert Bruce Smith, a railroad agent also from Columbus County, in February 1908. Lizzie was sixteen and Robert twenty six years old. Census records show that she and Robert had eight children:
Otis Walton (Oct. 5, 1913)
Margaret Lee (Nov. 8, 1916)
Mary Elizabeth (Mar. 27, 1919)
Martha Ann (Feb. 28, 1922)
Ralph Bruce (Dec. 24, 1923)
Virginia Loubell (Dec. 17, 1926)
Dorothy Lillian (Jun. 15, 1929)
George Douglas (Jan. 14, 1932)
We have to keep in mind that census enumerations, while invaluable in giving a snapshot of family life, are done at ten-year intervals. There is also a gap in their coverage, which comes at a terrible time for our purposes: the 1890 census enumerations do not survive; they burned in a warehouse fire in 1921.
Births derived from census enumerations do not reflect all live births a woman would have had. In 1900 the U.S. infant mortality rate was 165 (deaths per 1000 live births). The rate in 2019 was 5.7. The death rate for the first year of life was 100. Furthermore, finding a young child in a census enumeration does not mean that they lived to adulthood: childhood diseases such as diphtheria, pertussis, and measles took the lives of many children between the ages of 2 and 12 in the late 19th and early 20th century. Remember that penicillin was not discovered until 1928. Illness and mortality rates would have been higher in some states than others at various points during the second half of the 19th century and first two decades of the 20th. One of the most frequently listed supposed causes for admission to Dix across this period was simply “ill health” (the term appears 1500 times in the admissions ledgers). Fertility rates would also have varied particularly between urban and rural areas. American family size dropped across the 19th century in part because of urbanization. However, North Carolina was still an overwhelmingly rural state in 1900, and children played important roles in the farm economy. “Farmer” appears more than 1600 times in the admissions ledgers. North Carolina was urbanizing at a fast pace as it entered the 20th century, but largely in response to the growth of the textile industry. With family income dependent upon multiple members working at a given mill—including children 12 or younger–mill families routinely continued to have six or more children through the 1910s.
There was a five-year gap between her marriage in February 1908 and the appearance in the census enumerations of a “first” child, Otis, in October of 1913. Of course, any number of things might explain this, including miscarriage and/or still-birth, but I wondered if there was a live birth “hidden” in the records. One of the categories of resources available through Ancestry.com is “public family trees”: online family trees created and made searchable by other subscribers. They might include ancestors identified from family archives and recollections who, for whatever reason, do not show up in public records. Indeed, this was the case for Lizzie’s family. Several such trees included a baby born in 1910 named Robert Franklin Smith. How to verify this? Another very useful source available through Ancestry is Find A Grave, a site now owned by Ancestry that had started as a site for locating the burial places of celebrities. It now includes graves of millions of “ordinary” people and inventories of entire cemeteries, among them the Gore Cemetery in Whiteville, Columbus County, North Carolina. And there we find the grave of Robert Franklin Smith, buried in January 1913.
So, we now know that Lizzie gave birth to at least nine children:
Robert Franklin (Oct. 22, 1910)
Otis Walton (Oct. 5, 1913)
Margaret Lee (Nov. 8, 1916)
Mary Elizabeth (Mar. 27, 1919)
Martha Ann (Feb. 28, 1922)
Ralph Bruce (Dec. 24, 1923)
Virginia Loubell (Dec. 17, 1926)
Dorothy Lillian (Jun. 15, 1929)
George Douglas (Jan. 14, 1932)
Three of whom were born before her admission to Dix on Jan. 28, 1917:
Robert Franklin (Oct. 22, 1910)
Otis Walton (Oct. 5, 1913)
Margaret Lee (Nov. 8, 1916)
Find a Grave also tells us why Robert did not appear in census enumerations or other records: he died Jan. 28, 1913.
Proceed to next chapter.
