Grandma's final days in the almshouse

It's amazing what genealogical research can do to you. Individuals you never met, whose lives ended long before yours began, yet sometimes there can be an emotional connection or reaction to a nugget of information uncovered.

This was the case as I began looking into one of my great-great-great-grandparents recently. The end of her life was a sad time, residing in an almshouse, possibly suffering from significantly impaired cognitive abilities, and dying in a state hospital.

When it comes to the Ellis line of my maternal family tree, I've struggled to get too much definitive information beyond my 3rd great-grandfather George Ellis, and I've never delved into his wife, my 3rd great-grandmother, Caroline. All I ever knew about her was that George had married a woman named Caroline, and together they had several kids.

Turns out that she's really a Susan — Susan Caroline Marvin. Caroline, as she used her middle name throughout her life, was born on August, 19, 1830, to Seth and Susan Marvin in Alstead, New Hampshire, a very small town near the Vermont border. At this point, I know nothing of her parents, nor any siblings she may have had. Much of her youth remains an enigma for me, with no real records uncovered until 1855, when she was 25-years-old.

Caroline and George had already married, presumably before she turned 20-years-old, when she gave birth to their first child, Julia A. Ellis, in October 1850. The family would grow to eight known children born over a 15-year-period, 1850 to 1865. At least three of those eight would die young — George Henry Ellis of typhoid fever at age 21 in 1875, Willie M. Ellis of tuberculosis at age 19 in 1885, and Charles Albert Ellis at age 33 in 1884.

The Ellis family shows up as residents of Worcester, Massachusetts, in both the State and Federal Census. Caroline typically does not have an occupation listed on the Census forms, though she does appear as a dressmaker in the Massachusetts Census of 1865.

The big question marks begin as middle-age hits in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. In the 1870 Census, the entire Ellis family (other than eldest child Julia, then 20-years-old) is residing in Worcester. However, by June 1880 it appears by Census data that George and Caroline have called it quits. George, who is identified as a married man, is residing on Pink Street in Worcester with the family of his son Frank. Caroline is identified as "widowed/divorced" and residing with the family of daughter Julia on Cambridge Street in Worcester.

It appears that Caroline likely remarried as death records for her son Charles shows his parents as Caroline and "George Smith." It is possible, however, that Smith was erroneously written in place of Ellis.

George Ellis would pass away in Worcester on January 1, 1892, at the age of 66. His cause of death is "Bronchitis La Grippe," indicating he suffered from both bronchitis and the flu.

In the 1910 Census, Caroline Ellis appears as a 79-year-old widow listed as an "inmate" at an almhouse known as the Worcester Home Farm. An almhouse is a poorhouse, typically a home for a city's poor to stay. In the case of the Worcester Home Farm, as noted in a 2014 Worcester Telegram & Gazette feature, "life was difficult." The article notes the almhouse's residents, or inmates, "were not permitted to be idle; or talk without permission; nor leave. It was considered shameful to be considered a pauper, and the location of the Poor Farm enabled the city to provide for their needs while ostricizing them from the community." Similarly, Michael D. Kane wrote about the property for MassLive in 2016, explaining it had been "Worcester's first foray into curing social ills ... It had been the place where Worcester housed its extremely poor, mentally ill and those suffering from communicable diseases."

A portion of the Worcester Home Farm properties.

The Worcester Home Farm is reported to have been a 599-acre farm, that featured a hospital, farming, animals raised for slaughter, and even for a hog-fueled garbage disposal system. From 1872 to 1932, which includes Caroline's time at the Worcester Home Farm, the city of Worcester employed a "piggery" to tackle local trash. Pigs would devour the trash while, the Telegram & Gazette reports, "helping to line the city's coffers." The smell from the piggery is said to have traveled for miles and was most certainly a problem for Shrewsbury residents next door.

Caroline spent the final years of her life at the Worcester Home Farm, passing away at the State Hospital on March 22, 1912, at the age of 81. The cause of death was cellulitis of the leg, a bacterial skin infection that is quite painful. Left untreated it can become lethal when it spreads to lymph nodes and the bloodstream. Caroline's death certificate notes she had been treated medically for the condition for just more than six weeks before her death.

In addition to the cellulitis, Dr. George A. McIver reports on Caroline's death certificate that she had been suffering from a "Senile paranoid condition" for 10 years.

How long Caroline had resided in Worcester's Home Farm is not yet clear, nor whether she was there as a destitute woman estranged from or widowed by her late husband, abandoned by her children, or housed on some sort of mental diagnosis. What is known, or at least pretty safely assumed, is that she had a pretty rough second half of her life — burying at least three of her children by the time she was 61-years-old, 10 years with a "Senile paranoid condition," and presumably a decade or more within the cold, restrictive, and uncaring walls of the Worcester Home Farm.