Margaret (Reily) Paine

1850 US Federal Census - Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

Little is known about my 3^rd great-grandmother Margaret, we don’t even know who her parents were.  By piecing together information drawn from a few census records, a couple of church records, and a medical article we can see some joy and some sorrow in Margaret’s life.

First Marriage

Margaret was born in 1823 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  She married my 3^rd great-grandfather, Frederick Paine most likely in 1839 or early 1840.  They had five children, a girl and then four boys.

Tragedy of 1854

Frederick died and was buried in May 1854, at age 38.  And then their infant son, Edward, died at 11 months old in October 1854.  Their cause of death is not known, no records have been found. One theory of mine came to me after reading an article, “The Lancaster County Cholera Epidemic of 1854 and the Challenge to the Miasma Theory of Disease” by John B. Osbourne.

Cholera hit hard in Lancaster County in 1854, and impacted Columbia especially hard late that summer.  A medical team was dispatched from the College of Physicians of Philadelphia to Columbia.  The article details the challenges the medical profession had that year as they identified and tried to handle the outbreak.  There had been 2.5% of the population of Columbia die of Cholera and 2/3 of those 127 people had died within a mere five hours of symptoms.  The medical community was not in agreement on how a person got Cholera, causing fear among the public of how to, or how to not contract it.  Much of the city fled.  At the same time, people refused to interact with others for fear of catching Cholera, “…and much suffering from the want of wholesome food ha[d] been the result.”  The date of the source of this quote is 4 Oct 1854, just seven days before Margaret and Frederick’s son, Edward was buried.  Edward had been baptized on 6 Sep 1854, the first day of the Cholera outbreak in Columbia.  It is possible that infant Edward suffered from malnutrition during such a time. 

Life Goes On

Her remaining four children ranged in age from 5-14 years old.  Margaret married Jacob Crosby in May of 1855.  The widower Jacob brought two sons from his first marriage, ages 7 and 5.  They would go on to have five children of their own.  Jacob died 10 years later in 1865, one year after both her eldest son and stepson enlisted for the Civil War.  Margaret died of consumption (tuberculosis) in Columbia, PA in 1875 at the age of 51 years.