My grandfather was 50 when my mother was born and so we have sort of a chronologically skipped generation in our family. His name was John Shimp and he had a sister Elizabeth who married Floyd Skirvin and moved to Oklahoma. She had three little boys and one day – one very hot day – two of them turned up missing. She ran all the way out into the prairie to find her husband and then collapsed and died of heat stroke. I don’t know if if my grandfather was in the group of her brothers who went out to bring her body back to Sturgis for burial or not.

She’s there in the 1910 census (her first name was Sarah after her mother) with her husband and three boys, Earl and Glen and Ross; she is not in the 1920 census. In that census, they are back with their dad’s folks in Michigan.

Anyway, I have heard that story all my life as a warning about exerting in the heat, just as I cannot remember being cautioned about rusty nails, since an ancestor in another family branch hit his foot with an axe and wound up dying of lockjaw.