Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: What Is the Most Unusual Cause of Death You Have Discovered?

I have to veer a little off to the side for tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun topic from Randy Seaver.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision

1.  What is the most unusual cause of death you have discovered for your ancestors?

2.  Tell us about the most unusual cause of death you found in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook Status post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

[Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic!]

The reason I have to veer off a little is because I haven't found any particularly unusual causes of death in my own family, for my ancestors or collateral relatives.  And while I didn't find an unusual cause of death in my half-sister's family, I did find a situation regarding deaths that is worthy of note.

A few years ago I wrote about the time I printed out a five-generation family tree for my half-sister's mother's side of the family and discovered that not a single man in the family had reached the age of 60.  Every man but one had died of a heart attack by the age of 59.  So, not an unusual cause of death, but an unusual number of the same type.

At the time I made this grisly discovery, that cousin had not yet reached 59.  I never learned whether he had made the same observation about the men in his family, but he retired before turning 60.  He lived to the ripe old age of 79, dying just shy of his 80th birthday.

During my research for others, the most unusual (and unexpected) cause of death I have found was described thusly:

In case you're having trouble reading that, it's:

(a) Shock, Traumatic

Due to (b) Hemorrhage & Concussion of Brain

Due to (c) Multiple injuries of head

And in case you were wondering, the coroner's jury did come back with a verdict of homicide.

I would like to think that is still considered an unusual cause of death.

Death in Chicago

"Homicide in Chicago 1870-1930" is the fascinating Web site of the Chicago Historical Homicide Project, which began with the discovery of Chicago Police Department records of more than 11,000 homicides occurring in Chicago between 1870-1930.  Some additional deaths by misadventure are included, such as auto accident, suicide, and accidental poisoning.  The main feature of the Web site is a database of all the deaths from the logs.  The database may be searched by name, age, sex, or occupation of the victim or defendant, date, circumstances of the death, outcome of a trial, and several other variables.  The database may also be downloaded in several formats.  The site includes information about the historical and legal contexts of the homicides, several articles that can be downloaded, synoposes of about two dozen "crimes of the century", and more.  The graphics on the links at the top of the page change as you go back and forth between pages.  Warning:  Some links don't work from some of the pages.

The site says that the records run without interruption for the sixty years that they cover, so the inference is that they should be complete.  They probably are for homicides, but apparently not for all other deaths.  I looked for a suicide I know occurred on March 1, 1930 (I even have the death certificate), and it isn't there.  There is a comment on the site about how the homicides in the records became cases, so maybe this suicide didn't become a case, however that might be defined.