Hubbard History Pt 2, etc.

Death certificate from Kentucky Vital Records Project

My oldest son Dylan is 23.  He's all excited this week because he & his younger brother Derek are getting ready for the first show of their band The Sentinels.  Dylan & his gal Sarina are expecting a baby girl this June.  It's strange, tragic too, to think that my great-grandma Mary Lee (Brummet) Hubbard was just 23, the mother of two young boys (William & Colonel) when the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918 took her life.  World War I was just winding down in Europe when the flu hit.  More than a fifth of all people in the world were infected, more than a quarter of all Americans got it.  Ten times as many Americans died from the flu than from the war!  Of all the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe, half died from the flu instead of the fight.  People age 18-34 were hit much more frequently and much harder.  Many young adults would sicken and smother in their own mucus in the space of a day or so, and no real effective treatment.  Awful, just awful.

  I don't know how much news the Hubbards heard down there in Pulaski County, Kentucky, but the world was totally transforming.  Empires were colliding and crumbling, emperors & kings were being murdered or deposed, kingdoms were converting to republics, little duchys and territories and what-not linked up into countries.  The map started to look like something we might recognize.  Britain occupied Palestine and later just arbitrarily draws lines on the world map, sowing the seeds of future chaos in places we now know as Israel, Kuwait, Iraq, Pakistan, India.  Yes, the British Empire has caused us some headaches over the years, to say the least, and many lives have been lost in cleaning up their messes.  But I haven't figured out any way (yet, other than their traditional rivalry) to blame them for Russia's revolution, which produced the Soviet Union.  That sure filled the heart of the 20th century with misery, until we finally had to go deep into debt and create monsters like Osama bin Laden to weaken them.  And then... and then... and then...  The Law of Unintended Consequences produces some fascinating results.

Now you went and got me rambling about the state of the world, when what I meant to talk about was Hubbards.  After Mary Lee died of the flu, her husband Monteville had to get on with life so he married Dolly Hicks to take care of his two boys and to have some more babies.  More on all of them later.  But little William was lucky enough to grow up and meet Ida Belle Farmer and marry her.  Her parents were caretakers of this house in Stanford, Kentucky.

My mom, Jackie, was born in the upstairs bedroom of this house.  I remember sleeping up there when I was real little, under a pile of handmade quilts thicker than me.  You had to go down those funny narrow steps that turned a corner so one was like a triangle.  Downstairs was like a sitting room but it seems that there were also a couple of beds.  The center of the front wall was dominated by a pump organ which is now at my brother Scott's house.  You had to go out on that porch to the left side of the house to get to the kitchen which was further back.  It had a kerosene stove with ornate glass cylinders for the fuel.  If mom can get me the address of the place I'll try to add an aerial view from Google.