Notes from 1905-1906

Observations:

The files from 1905 and 1906 were fairly similar to the files from earlier years. There were a few new things I noticed, however. The spelling was often incorrect, and the names of the deceased varied depending on what page I was looking at. Also, the "h" was left out of Pittsburgh, which I found out was due to the fact that the spelling of the city was almost changed.

Sometimes more than one cause of death was recorded, and in one case I found three different causes of death that were unrelated to each other, as if the coroner could not decide what actually killed the man.

There were also many unidentified bodies in the files. Several cases involved a body that was found floating in a river, and was listed as "Unknown White Male" when he was unable to be identified. Suicide rates also seemed to go up, with shootings as the most common method of killing oneself. Often the victims were in their twenties, but occasionally elderly people would shoot themselves and, in testimony from family members, the deceased had talked about killing themselves because they had been sick or were very old.

Work-related deaths continued to be prevalent-- men would died working for railroad companies, mills, mines; anywhere. This was twice as tragic; families needed money to support themselves, and when a husband died and was survived by a wife and possibly children, they were not able to make ends meet without a source of income. The wife had to find a job and still manage to raise her children.

Many more files from 1905-06 seem to be somewhat sloppily put together, and some of the more difficult immigrant names were frequently spelled up to four different ways within the individual documents in each record. It appeared that the coroner either started getting lazy during this time period or was overworked. I know that if I had to come to the scene of yet another train accident day after day after day, I probably would be more inclined to not sweat the small things. However, I am still amazed that these documents are technically government records, and can be unofficial-looking at times due to the way the records are kept.

The number of files that begin to pop up as "Unknown white/colored male/female" is startling. There are far less number of unidentifiable deceased in the few years prior to 1905-1906. I myself did not notice, but maybe a different coroner took over the records for this year. I cannot explain the differences between records from this time period and the ones from 1900-1904 through random occurrences or coroner error, but something definitely caused these records to be noticeably different in the way they were kept.

Another aspect I found interesting was the amount of drowning deaths during the summer months of 1905. Occasionally there was a drowning death here and there in the records from the 1900s, but in 1905 during the June/July months it appeared as if at least one in five of the files were those of someone drowning accidentally or being found drowned by someone. Obviously, more people bathed in the many Pittsburgh rivers during this time since it was warmer out, but the sheer amount of deaths from drowning during this time period has me scratching my head trying to understand. I myself have never gone swimming in the Allegheny, Ohio, or Monongahela Rivers, but I cannot imagine so many people succumbing to the perils of these rivers.

Several interesting files I have noticed from this time period document error of judgment; in one case, a 12-year-old boy went for a ride on a makeshift raft in a garbage dump runoff pond where locals went to "drown cats and dogs", and he could not swim. Sure enough, he fell off the raft and ended up drowning. Testimony from his mother concluded this story with quite a nice ending: she stated that she had: "told him not to go playing down there since he can't swim, but he ran off anyways". I can only assume she felt she had tried her hardest to deter him from playing in the disease-ridden garbage pond with dead animals in it unsupervised, apparently.

Another instance occurred when a teenage boy went bathing in the Monongahela by himself, even though he was not an avid swimmer. He began to drown, and an adult tried to save him; unfortunately the would-be rescuer drowned as well. While I think that people should have had a little more common sense when dealing with bodies of water if they could not swim, it does appear that Pittsburgh's rivers have claimed many lives over the years, leading me to believe that those gentle currents must be pretty deceiving and quite dangerous.