The earliest story I've found about an ancestor is from 1580. A French ancestor's wife was very ill. He feared she would die. There was a German army advancing, and some kind of plague was rampant. He was trying to find people who would be witnesses to her will, but everyone was afraid of getting ill. He finally found two who would sign. She survived. Women in France actually had independent property rights, necessitating a will. #genealogy
@poemblaze I looked it up and i think it was the bubonic plague that was going around! 👀 It does not sound like a pleasant thing to get either: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21590-bubonic-plague
@poemblaze And when i say "doesn't sound like a pleasant thing to get" i mean that as a "besides the whole part about DYING from it" sorta thing... 😬
@ChillySnowgirl She fell ill Jan 26, 1588.
@poemblaze And i STILL cannot post my full reply 😭
Here's the link. It's in light purple =/ https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/medicine/bubonic-plague-first-pandemic#:~:text=The%20first%20wave%2C%20called%20the,virulent%20strain%20of%20the%20disease.
@ChillySnowgirl Thanks. That corroborates this story. It seems she didn't have the plague, but people thought she did.
@poemblaze No that article says there were 3 "waves" of it!
"The first wave, called the Black Death in Europe, was from 1347 to 1351. The second wave in the 1500s saw the emergence of a new virulent strain of the disease. The last pandemic at the end of the 1800s spread across Asia and at last gave scientific medicine the opportunity to identify the cause of the disease and its means of transmission."
@ChillySnowgirl You are right about that, but the archive story says people were panicked, fearing she had plague. Apparently she didn't. People knew what the symptoms were. She had something else at the time when plague was prevalent.