It's not Romeo and Juliet, but a tragedy still...

"It was a blessing they were taken together for they were deeply in love and neither could have lived without the other",  wrote my 2nd great aunt, Charlotte (Lottie) Deacon, to my mother in a note scribbled in pencil in 1955.  She was referring to her niece, Frances Leary Schooley (1890-1918) and her husband, Vincent Leroy Schooley (1890-1918). She had also enclosed a photograph of Frances, supposedly on the day of her marriage to Vincent, June 26, 1915.  Frances looks relaxed and happy.

Frances Leary Schooley, June 1915

Vincent is described on his WW I draft registration card as tall and slender, with blue eyes and brown hair .  I wish I had a photo of him.  I've no idea how the two of them met.

Their impending nuptials were reported briefly in the Niagara Falls Gazette (Frances used her stepfather's last name for the newspaper).  Her parents stood as witnesses for their marriage.

Niagara Falls Gazette, June 23, 1915

In only the way a love story about ill-fated lovers can end, this one ended tragically in 1918, the year of the Spanish flu pandemic that afflicted about one-third of the world's population.  With no vaccine to inoculate against the flu, and no antibiotics to treat secondary infections, it's estimated there were fifty million deaths worldwide; 675,000 in the US alone!  And just like today, the very young and the elderly were most at risk,  but inexplicably this pandemic also uniquely affected a high number of people between the ages of 20 and 40.  (Source: https://www.cdc.gov/features/1918-flu-pandemic/index.html) Apparently, my ancestors were not immune.

Frances's death was first on November 29, 1918.  She suffered from chronic myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle.  The most common cause of myocarditis is a viral infection, so perhaps she became infected with the flu first which led to her heart attack.  Vincent died about a week later on December 6, 1918, from the Spanish flu.   It is hard to imagine the grief the families of these young people felt to have lost both of them so young, and so early in their marriage.  They were buried separately:  Vincent in his family's plot in Canada, and Frances in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo.