It was January of 1888, and probably cold, in the small German church that towered over the village of Tioga, Illinois. On that frosty day, the minister's sermon covers a Bible text where the writer asks not to be taken away in the midst of his days. It was appropriate for the task at hand. During the funeral for the thirty-six year old, her husband and seven children endure the lesson and wait for their wife and mother to be buried in the graveyard outside the church. The oldest child was nineteen, the youngest a toddler.

Six short years earlier, in the same church, the same family laid to rest their two-year-old daughter. In fact, in February and March of that year three families buried children in the church cemetery.

And in December of 1917, the father would also be buried from the same church and the minister would give a sermon based upon the first and second verses of the 91st Psalm. Six lines below his funeral entry is the entry for his daughter who died in the flu epidemic of 1918. Directly above her entry is that of her husband who preceded her in death by only six days. Tales of tragedy and heartache catch the reader's attention despite the span of time and probable differences in religious conviction.

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