Bosworths of Wichita

Exciting new discovery on ancestry.com! Two days ago I discovered that someone had posted a photo of my orphan grandmother’s uncle and family, taken c1895. I spent a Saturday morning studying their faces and eagerly looking for more information about them. 

It was touching to realize how much the man in this photo (Richard Bosworth) must have adored his sister Eva Bosworth Allen (my gg grandmother). He named two of his daughters Eva. And when Augustus, Eva, and Ethelyn moved to Wichita, Kansas in 1900, Richard Bosworth and his family followed shortly thereafter. It was especially moving to realize that my ten-year-old grandmother, Teresa (née Ethelyn), would have known her cousins before she was sent to an orphanage. According to a newspaper article, the two families were having dinner together at a birthday party for my great grandfather in March 1903. My poor grandmother lost not only her parents, but also her whole extended family at a very tender age.

As I looked into the lives of each one of people in this photo, it began to dawn on me that they may be the key to unlocking the cause of death of my great grandmother Eva L. Allen. This has been one of my longstanding genealogy puzzles! I noticed that Richard and three of his five children died within a short time, between 1907 and 1910. Death records verify that two of them died of tuberculosis. It is a safe assumption that the others died of tuberculosis as well. Eva would have been either living with them, or spending a great deal of time with them in those years as she was a “widow” (actually divorced), and had a close relationship with her brother. She died in 1911, probably of the same tuberculosis that killed most of her brother’s family. She died in a hospital as there was no family left to care for her. Her gravestone is in the Old Fort Supply cemetery in Woodward, Oklahoma.

I have had a hard time shaking the sadness for my family who lived so long ago, and suffered so much.

Front: Richard Bosworth, Ellen, Roy, and Maude Eva Back: Harry, George, Eva Pearl. Richard, Harry, George, and Pearl died before 1910. The 1910 U.S. Census shows Ellen as head of household, living with granddaughter Marguerite, age 8 (child of Pearl?). The same year, the census shows Eva L. Allen, widow, (pictured below) living at the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane.