August and Charlotte Swedenborg Lose Three Children to Contagious Diseases

233rd in the series Tales from Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery

By SUE HUNTER WEIR

“Our need will be the real creator.”*

Plato, 380 BC

August William Swedenborg was 16 years old when he arrived in America. He was born in Sweden on October 20, 1855. Before moving to Minneapolis, he briefly lived in Chautauqua, New York and Titusville, Pennsylvania. On June 3, 1877, he married Charlotte Scruf. Over the course of the next 17 years, Charlotte gave birth to eleven children. Three of those children died young from highly contagious diseases.
Mina Anna Swedenborg (A. M. Swedenborg in the Cemetery’s records) died on March 13, 1881, from diphtheria. She is one of 923 people buried in the Cemetery, most of them children, who died from that disease. And that number includes only those buried in our Cemetery. In the 1800s, one out of every seven deaths was caused by diphtheria. That began to change in 1926 when a vaccine first became available.

Annie Elizabeth Swedenborg was one year and 20 days old when she died from measles and pneumonia on June 28, 1887. Measles was the official cause of death for140 people buried in the Cemetery; 131 of them are children under the age of five.… Read the rest “August and Charlotte Swedenborg Lose Three Children to Contagious Diseases”