Death, Death and more Death

There are a lot of ways to die.  In the land of Neelsdom, you've got your gastroenteritis, your hemorrhage, old age/neglect, sudden heart attacks, stroke, falling out of apartment buildings because a mom is ghetto enough to leave a toddler unattended, auto collision...

It's like The Great Neels knew something about death or something.

I've been pretty busy this month.  In my ward (congregation) I had the brilliant idea (aided and abetted by the ward Family History consultant--yes, Mormons are that OCD about genealogy) to challenge the men of the ward to an Index-off.  And it's all in the nature of a friendly little wager.  Whichever auxiliary (the women or the men) Index more names this month wins (WINS!) an ice-cream social and glorious bragging rights forever and ever!!  My sacred honor rests on crushing them.  (Yes, I have not been above some ecclesiastical smack-talk.)

Indexing is simply an organized way to drive rational people insane.

Indexing is pretty simple.  You download a digital scan of a historic document--census records, draft registrations, death certificates, etc.--and simply (simple if you can read the writing) type into designated fields the information you see.  It makes the document search-able for those that are looking for their family history records.

Yes.  In Utah, they can even index in prison.

And it's been engrossing.  But last week I stumbled onto a batch of un-Indexed Texas Death Certificates.  It's actually been a bit sobering.  My findings:

• There are a LOT of ways to die and though these records are pretty old Texas was not shy about recording the details.  ("Repeated blunt force trauma while working on an oil rig", "Auto accident and subsequent fire" and worse ones.)
• Betty Neels had a pretty normal range of methods that seemed to mirror what I was reading--lots and lots of myocardial infarction, gastroenteritis and auto collisions.
• When people get old, sometimes people stop caring about them.  If only some thin-young woman in need of an occupation could have been spared to sit with them and read semi-trashy romance novels...
• The babies are the hardest to Index.  Lots of deaths after just hours.  There was a toddler who had passed away by drinking kerosene and I thought of all those babies in Neeldom who have to be treated in the Burn Units by heroic RDDs because of overturned kerosene heaters.  Clearly, this was something that The Great Betty had seen in her nursing life and just hated.

Anyway, my next-door-neighbor is an hard core emergency room nurse (a must if you have three boys) and just this week I trotted my third pledge over with a non-urgent medical question (she is happily willing to be used in this way) because it's always skin-conditions with that one.  And sometimes I forget, because I've only used her for the little things that she's seen things that would curl your toes.  The Great Betty is a bit like that for me.  I read her convenient medical plot points pretty casually and sometimes forget that she saw each and every one probably and, though I imagine you find ways to cope with it, also had to struggle with all that.

Betty the Awesome

Anyway, I don't really have another point just props to La Neels.

P.S. So far we're beating the men but not crushing them.  Cross your fingers!