Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Describe One of Your Own, or an Ancestor's, Life Turning Point

An interesting topic from Randy Seaver for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

1.  Every historical person has major events, milestones, and "turning points" in his life, from birth through death and even beyond.  These events, milestones, and turning points can be the basis for family stories of the historical person.

2.  Please share one of those events in your own life or the life of one of your ancestors.

3.  Share your information about your major event, milestone, or turning point in your own blog post, write a comment on this blog post, or put it in a Substack post, Facebook Note, or some other social media system.  Please leave a comment on this post so others can find it.

If you write about one of your ancestors without being able to talk to that person, you have to be the judge of what might have been a turning point in that person's life, which might be difficult sometimes.  It's easy to decide what a turning point was in the life of my paternal grandfather, though, even if he didn't call it that.

After an accident, my grandfather had a leg amputated at the age of 12 or 13.  That's an obvious turning point in someone's life, because it's going to affect a lot of things that happen to you afterward, especially when the event took place in 1916.

Something I have wondered about since having learned more details about the accident is how Grandpa was able to get hospital care and when he might have first been fitted with a prosthesis (and what would that have been like in the first quarter of the 20th century?).  His parents never had a lot of money, and this would have put a huge strain on the family.  I have begun to suspect that his paternal grandmother, Katherine "Kate" Moore, might have stepped in to pay for things.  I know when Grandpa's father, Elmer, died in 1918, she was the one who paid for the funeral.

Elmer's death would also have had an impact on the family's finances, as he was the breadwinner.  In the 1915 New Jersey state census, Grandpa's mother, Laura, was listed as a housewife, so she apparently was not employed outside the home at that time.  What did she do when Elmer died?  How did she support her family?  Did Kate help them?

Two years later, in 1920, Laura and her four children (including my grandfather) were enumerated in the census with her granduncle Amos and grandaunt Rebecca (notwithstanding the fact that the census taker listed her as their daughter and the four children as Amos and Rebecca's stepchildren).  Laura had no occupation; Amos was working as a farm laborer, but he did own his house free and clear.  Was Amos able to contribute to any expenses for Grandpa's care?  I think Kate was still alive then (I don't have documentation of her death, but many people list it as around 1922–1924 in their trees on Ancestry); was she helping?

And in 1923 Grandpa married his first wife, Elizabeth.  Did he have a prosthesis then?  I have found their marriage date in an index, but I don't yet have a copy of the marriage record.  What was his occupation?  How did he support his family?

I started looking around for information about prosthetics in this period.  Grandpa might have benefited from the innovations in this field that took place because of World War I.  With the large numbers of injured soldiers, changes were taking place in how prosthetics were designed and made.

The more I think about this, the more questions I have.  I need to do a lot more digging.