Death and Diaspora : Part Six

Just days after Aaron died, Caroline became pregnant. This may be just a coincidence, or it may be Moses panicking! This is and never shall be known. She was still of child bearing age, and there was no real reason why she should stop having children, despite being increasingly exhausted. There must have been some moments in the 1840’s when she thought “what is the point”. She was giving birth only to bury, feeding only to see her children reduced to skeletons through illness.

In all this confusion of emotion, death struck the Wertheim family again, or should I say, struck Caroline. Just a few weeks after Aaron died, Caroline lost her father, James Westcott. The cholera had mown him down too. This horrid, vile disease, showed no mercy, and had claimed both young and old now in the same family. James was 72 years of age at the time he died, and Caroline lost one half of the two people who had been with her through thick and thin. As devastated as she was, she could not weep for her father. She had known him all her life and he had passed her on to Moses, entrusting her care to him. James would have died a happy man knowing his daughters were all happily married, even if he had had to have signed the death certificates for most of his grandchildren.

In death, James had left no will. His money was sent to unknown locations, despite not having much. Cabinet making was all he knew, and after his death in the winter of 1849, Caroline was left unto her own family.

And as the months after James passed by, Moses and Caroline were once again blessed. Another girl was born in summer 1850, and she was named Amelia Elizabeth. In the following years, Amelia would sadly die, as her siblings before her tragically did. She died, in actual fact, three months before the birth of the next Wertheim child, Sarah. Sarah remains a mystery to us, because after the age of eighteen, she disappears. Completely, utterly, disappears. The journey to locate her may be a long one, as we do not even know if she married. She completely and utterly disappears. A mystery in her own right. But she is not forgotten. Typical of this family perhaps, that those who survived are the hardest to track down.

Yet, for those who were left behind, life was about to take a very interesting turn. Moses and Caroline, together with their surviving children, Samuel, Rebecca, Louisa III and Sarah. By 1854, the money accumulated by this family seems to have taken somewhat of a dip. Moses, by now was struggling, for reasons unknown. His eldest surviving son, Samuel, decided to take things into his own hands, as his childhood friends seemed to enter into the wrong sort of circles. Here we see the beginnings of the real change that leads ultimately to the Wertheim family splitting in two. Not for the better, either…