Jacob Albert Carter was born in 1850 and died on December 27, 1893 at the young age of forty-two, leaving behind his widow (my mother’s mother, Margaret Jane Kennedy Carter) and eight children ranging in age from six to nineteen years old.
Jacob was a farmer, of thin build and medium height and “had a mustache.” I suppose this might describe a lot of his contemporaries in Braxton County, WV.
The general account of Jacob’s untimely death is as follows:
“He was returning home with Christmas presents for his family, either on Christmas Eve or several days before Christmas, and slipped on the ice and fell crossing a small stream.”
Dora Woods (Frantz) was the daughter of Emma Florence (this would be my mother’s first cousin) and whom my great-grandmother went to live with (her daughter, Emma) in California around 1910 (?), stated that “an icicle pierced his heart.”
June Woods (Ketcham) stated that “he broke a rib and it penetrated his lung.”
Some accounts say it happened Christmas Eve, others say a couple days before. Apparently he did not immediately die.
What begs the question—since his widow, Margaret Jane (whom it seems my mother, Margaret Ruth, was likely named after) seemed to supply a bulk of stories/accounts that went into the family history book—is why there wasn’t more definitive/objective details about this tragic and obviously shocking event.
While many people did not often live past their sixties and seventies, it is pretty clear that at forty-two years old, this man was in the prime of his life.
One would think that the story of a man coming home with Christmas presents for his family and tragically falling on ice while crossing a small stream and sucumbing to death from the accident would have been so memorable and significant as to have detailed account of the sequence of events.
Who knows—perhaps it was so traumatizing that the details were not pressed out of his widow before her death in 1939–and that is why the account is somewhat sketchy.
What we know for certain is that he died on December 27, 1893 of some type of uncanny, seemingly freak-accident. Slipping on ice is not uncommon. But to slip in such a way that (likely) a rib was broken and punctured a lung (I am thinking that being pierced through the heart with an icicle was an idea/understanding that grew a bit from family legend, but, conveys some type of spiritual significance perhaps) seems to be a situation where there was some type of alignment of worse-case outcome.
That said, I suppose that a broken rib in those days could easily lead to a collapsed lung. With great recollection of the fear I had in 2013 when I learned (from Alabama) in the most terrible way that my oldest son, Zach, had been hit by a car while on his bike and was in Christiana Hospital with internal injuries (including broken ribs and a collapsed lung), I have additional gratitude that he survived.
This is a tangent, somewhat (but my mind goes logically here when thinking about ribs puncturing lungs), but I learned of the accident the next morning through seeing an emergency prayer request email from a church with which we had been associated saying along the lines of “please pray for Z—E–, he was hit by a car on his bicycle yesterday evening and is in pretty bad shape with internal (possibly it said “critical”) injuries.”
I will never forget the sense of immediate, deep fear that gripped my mother’s heart and that next half hour of phone calls…and my trip to Delaware a couple days later arriving on Easter Sunday to gratefully be able to pick my son up from the hospital and bring him to where he lived, staying several days to help in the situation. He had a number of very serious injuries which thankfully were dealt with in the emergency room and later with no permanent damage or death.
I learned through a close friend more details of that accident after dark and there is simply no other way to put it but that God permitted me to learn that another person who was a Christian was the one who found my son unconscious on a back street, alone, after the accident and called an ambulance.
I shudder to think what have might have happened to my son, who was around twenty-four years old, had not the God who sees permitted my son to be found almost immediately after the truly accidental accident, the details of which I need not go into.
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But back to Jacob Albert Carter. At the time of his death, my grandmother Mary Effie would have been ten years old. Her sister, Emma, was four years older. In terms of my personal quest to understand my grandmother, posthumously (and she died somewhat young at age fifty-seven, when my mother was seventeen) in terms of her spirituality, I have no reason to now believe she was some sort of “troublemaker,” contrary to family narrative.
I have every reason to believe she was raised no differently than her old sisters and especially, Emma Florence, who was portrayed as a deeply godly, spiritual woman of the matriarchal sort (in the best way, as a keeper of the home).
What I do see is a pattern in my mother’s lineage of parents dying prematurely in a variety of ways that were potentially quite developmentally damaging and outcome-effecting in their life situations and possibly, choice-making, at certain significant points.
So far, I have noticed that:
- Thomas Kennedy’s father died when he was young and he had little memories of him.
- Thomas Kennedy’s mother died an untimely, premature death in quite a dramatic way—as she and her youngest two sons were about to immigrate from Ireland and depart for the United States via Liverpool, they were accidentally poisoned (and died) by a family friend who mistook rat poison for baking powder and fed them home-made biscuits which killed them, along with all but one of the host/host’s children (and we don’t know who survived in that group).
- Thomas Kennedy appears to have formed a deathbed curse within a month before his death in 1885 (more on this later) when his daughter, Margaret Jane Kennedy (my great grandmother) was thirty-four years old. At the point of Thomas Kennedy’s death, Margaret Jane had been married twenty years to Jacob Albert Carter and their youngest of eight children (Junnie Francis Carter) was one-year-old. Within five years of this seeming deathbed curse, of which Margaret Jane and two siblings were the seeming target of, my great-grandmother became a widow when Jacob Carter met an unfortunate mishap while attempting to return home with Christmas presents for his family in 1893, and died of injuries sustained.
- My grandmother, Mary Effie, thus had the misfortune of losing her father when she was ten years old.
- Mary Effie passed away when my mother was seventeen, but not after my mother had been mysteriously raised her first three years of life by an aunt on her mother’s side (the Carter family). My mother spoke of this situation to me, as did another family member, and I find the lack of details available of this situation as striking (if not more so) as the lack of precise details surrounding the death of Jacob Albert Carter. There will definitely be more written/formed of my increased understanding (and inherent, logical questions) about my mother’s first three years.
- My mother became a widow at age 55 when my father, who was 65, died what I consider pre-mature death. While I certainly believe that his death/heart condition was developed/hastened/exacerbated by the very real stress he was under in dealing with my mother’s condition (another subject to be addressed from new angles of insight/information), the fact remains that we see again a pattern of premature widowhood (Thomas Kennedy’s mother as well as Margaret Jane Kennedy) and a young teenager being left by a prematurely deceased parent.
- In my case, it has always felt that because of the difficulties in my relationship with my mother, who quite honestly by that point was not really capable of filling the true role of a mother in any meaningful way but I found myself caring for her, in a role reversal, that when my father died on May 10, 1979 when I was days away from turning sixteen that essentially, I was some form of an orphan.
At this point I pause to point out that I’ve also observed in my various readings a number of date/age coincidences in significant family events.
The date of May 10 is quite significant to me, since it is the date of my father’s death. The year 2005 is significant to me, as it was the year of my first divorce. This past April, I personally observed that one of the most difficult and upsetting interactions that ever occurred happened when I was fifty-eight years old, approaching my fifty-ninth birthday on May 16, 2022. (Incidentally, my father was drafted into WWII on May 16, 1941, and I was born on the same date in 1963. My father was an ambulance driver in the 29th Division and surely would have been among the first waves of troops on D-Day, had he not been in a hospital in England with pneumonia in early June 1944. That providence—we will never know—may have been part of how he survived, married my mother, and I acquired life through them, and then, my sons acquired life through me and their father…)
Each year, I find May to be quite a difficult time for me, in terms of personal milestones/remembrances. May 10th marks my father’s death; then there is Mother’s Day; May 16th marks my birthday; May 27th marks my oldest son’s birth; June 1st marks the date of my first marriage.
But quite honestly—given the number of difficulties and the nature of some of the themes that I was forced into personal battles with more deeply during the time of mid April 2022 especially through May10th and my birthdate, May 16th, found me recognizing some significant patterns/dates in a way previously unnoticed.
I am just thankful to my Jesus, who strengthens, guides and protects me, that I endured a rather dark time of spiritual assaults which would include the date of May 10, at fifty-eight years old, and celebrated my fifty-ninth birthday on May 16, 2022.
While the various spiritual assaults from several directions continued (and continue) beyond that time, the timing and date coincidences involved seemed spiritually significant to me on several levels.
I realize that my understanding and recognition of dark forces may be hard to communicate, especially since it is documentable only by a seemingly uncanny string of date coincidences and other subjective observations.
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I realize that in scripture there are some instances where God pronounces curses (consequences, upon generations) and other instances where humans pronounce dark curses on others. Over the summer I came upon a reading about generational curses which I found of interest.1
While of course this is a subject of debate in Christian understandings, the scriptures are not silent concerning practitioners of various evils, and the Christian being subject to spiritual assaults of dark, demonic forces. How this plays out in the natural realm is unknown–or at least, undocumentable, I suppose–but the thing I found most interesting in the linked reading is the idea/belief in African cultures where witchcraft/cursings are believed and actively pursued (and, this is not limited to that culture but here in the United States there are many forms of self-proclaimed witchcraft/cursings) is that of the deathbed curse.
It is believed that generational curses can only be pronounced downward; meaning children cannot curse their parents. The deathbed curse is perceived as the most powerful of all curses. Biblically, there are a number of references to deathbed blessings being given, so it is not a far stretch that there is may some spiritual basis to this belief. I had found a writing I wanted to further read (but have lost it at the moment…) that was commentary on (the biblical patriarch) Jacob’s deathbed cursing/blessings given in Genesis 49. I’m really not familiar with it, and it would be interesting to more deeply explore in commentary.
Manifestations (according to this article)1 of generational curses might include those listed below. I came across this article while doing a search of curiosity over a phrase I had heard here-and-there over a number of years called The Linger Luck. I Googled “is bad luck a generational curse” and somehow came up with this.1
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1How Curses Impact People and Biblical Responses
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