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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I suspect they had a x related genetic disorder.  Ma, Laura and I think Rose all had still born sons or ones who died in infancy.  Not having sons definitely had a negative impact on their financial condition.  Plus Pa’s really obvious adhd and then a string of bad luck with weather.

I think leaving out the particularly depressing parts was absolutely a common thing for almost all people born before maybe 1950.  How many of you have grandparents that suffered through the Great Depression or survived/fled the holocaust and how much did they talk about the really awful stuff, versus talking about the happy memories, or even telling the “it was tough but we banded together” type stories?  Or grandparents who lost a young child and never told the surviving children about it?  My grandmother was raised by a woman who lost almost all her family in the Irish famine and probably spent most of her childhood starving (and possibly in a work home) but never said word one about that to her grandchildren.  She talked about the herbs and flowers they had, the language, etc etc.  No one taught the Irish famine in school back then so my grandmother didn’t even know to ask her grandmother to talk about it.  The view was that it didn’t help anybody to relive all the worst memories.

But even with that said, the books are pretty horrific.  When her dad left to go find work and they didn’t hear from him for months and months and probably thought he had died and they’d never know how/when/where, and he almost froze to death/starved getting back to them…. Or the story where they all had. Cholera or whatever and were dying in their beds all too weak to stand and get water until a doctor just happened to be passing by and stopped in their cabin?  That’s insane.

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No. It is much more plausible instead of a genetic disorder, both Laura and Carrie suffered from severe malnutrition in their childhoods. Laura was under 5 feet and Carrie was around 4'8". They almost starved to death in the Long Winter and had no Vitamin C or D for months. They lacked protein and amino acids from meat, dairy, eggs. Records show a lot of frontier children were shorter than their same aged peers in the East. [/quote]

But Rose also had a stillborn son.   Out of 5 children of Ma, one one was a boy and he died in infancy (genetic odds would suggest she might have miscarried other male fetuses).  Laura also had a son that died after 12 days.  It’s likely Laura also had miscarriages as she had only 2 children in four years which wouldn’t be typical in that time period, absent miscarriage.  She didn’t have more pregnancies after Almonzo got diphtheria so it’s possible that made him infertile.

Their height was certainly affected by malnutrition but that wasn’t that oddly small back then.  My own grandmother, born in the 19th century, had great nutrition and never reached over 5’1”.   And in the old photos she towers over her own grandmother, who despite surviving the Irish famine as a child, went on to have 9 children. I have my great grandmothers wedding dress from the 1890s and it looks like a little child’s.  That’s very common with antique dresses.  They were tiny!  I don’t think that has much to do with fertility.  [/quote]

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