This is an extraordinary find. Entry 111 on this register:
Entry 111:
- Date: 15 March 1886 – The Asylum, Derry
- Name: James Laird
- Sex: Male
- Condition: Bachelor
- Age: 31
- Occupation: Grocer’s Assistant [or similar]
- Cause of Death: Tuberculosis – Certified
- Informant: Wm Pollard [asylum officer] – Present at death -The Asylum, Derry
- Registered: 19 March 1886
What this means:
James Laird, the eldest son of the “poor James” of William’s December 1885 will, “ill and long away from home”, was at the Derry Asylum, sick with tuberculosis. He died on 15 March 1886, just two months after William died on 15 January 1886. He was thirty-one years old and a bachelor. The informant was not a family member but an asylum officer, confirming how completely isolated James was from Bogstown.
William made his will in December 1885 knowing James was at the asylum with tuberculosis. The careful clause, that if James mended enough to come home, Thomas was to keep him, was almost certainly written in the knowledge that James was dying. William himself had a year of kidney disease behind him. Both men died within two months of each other in early 1886, and the family probably knew before either died that they were losing two members at once.
The tuberculosis thread now runs clean through the Bogstown generation:
- James Laird – died tuberculosis, Derry Asylum, 15 March 1886, aged 31
- Mary E. Wilson – died phthisis (tuberculosis) 18 months, at Bogstown 25 July 1886
- Thomas Laird – died tuberculosis and diarrhoea, Bogstown, 25 May 1895, aged 37
- Jean Laird – died phthisis (tuberculosis), Bogstown, 13 September 1895, aged 22
Four deaths in the same family from the same disease across nine years. The disease that killed James at the asylum took their cousin Mary Wilson and came back for Thomas and Jean at Bogstown.
