SIBYL'S STORY: ~THE STORY~---related-pages---site navigation
A brief and incomplete biography of Sibyl:
Wives who die before their time always come across as poor, pathetic creatures. Sibyl was anything but. She was a missionary nurse, going to Africa - a land that was totally unknown to her - and dealing with medical issues that were far worse than anything she saw at home. It seems just wrong that she ended up dying at home in Canada, of a rather common infection.
Sibyl was born August 27, 1897 in Quebec, a daughter of Henry and Elizabeth Hosking.
Sometimes in our letters she is called Sib, sometimes Bib. I haven’t yet worked out who called her what when. So I’m calling her Sibyl.
Why did she choose to become a missionary? She came from a religious family, and she was not the first missionary in the family. So the idea of being a missionary was familiar. But I don’t think any of her family was assigned to Africa, and Sibyl specifically requested Africa. Why Africa? I think that a couple named Kamba and Kathleen Simango may have gotten her interested. They were doing a fundraising tour for Africa, and Sibyl met them. You can read more about them in the Non-Family page for the Simangos.
We had three missionaries in the Stokey family: Fred and both of his wives. Each of them came to the work in a different way. Fred’s first wife, Mabel, was the child of missionaries in Africa, so becoming a missionary herself and going back to Africa would have seemed natural to her. Fred may have been interested in missionary work before he met Mabel, but she was what pulled him to Africa; practically the first thing he did upon arrival in Angola was to marry Mabel. But for Sibyl, Africa would have been new and very foreign, with no friends or family to welcome her there - although, on second thought, the Simangos were in Angola for a while.
Sibyl graduated from nursing school in Hamilton, Ontario, in May 1922, and at some point started the process of becoming a missionary. It was not a simple process. She applied to the Canadian mission board, requesting to be assigned to Angola. (It was Portuguese West Africa then, but I’m calling it Angola.) But because of the mission setup in Angola, she had to apply to both the Canadian mission board and the United States mission board. This she did, and managed to jump through whatever hoops there may have been.
Angola at this time was in Portuguese hands, and it was required that missionaries learn some Portuguese, so for each new missionary the voyage to Angola included a long stop in Lisbon.
Sibyl sailed from Canada to Portugal, with a stop in England on the way to pick up more passengers. It may have been on this voyage that she learned that she was prone to seasickness. She spent a few months in Lisbon, and then later in 1925 she finally went from Portugal south to Angola in a German steamer. (More seasickness.) In Angola she tackled learning the local language, Umbundu. She noted in a letter in February 1926 that she spent the first hour of the day after breakfast studying Umbundu.
She was assigned to the village of Chissamba. At first the doctor there was a Dr. Hall (I’m still working on finding a first name for him) but then, according to a 1927 book about the mission:
As Dr. Hall has been forced to resign for family reasons, no doctor is in residence at present (1927) and the work of treating the twenty thousand patients who came yearly to Dr. Hall devolves upon Miss Sibyl Hosking, a new arrival, who is already making her influence felt throughout the community.
There was some problem for which “for family reasons” appears to have been a euphemism, but I haven’t yet gotten the details on that. Whatever the story may have been, Dr. Hall’s departure was not planned, and Sibyl didn’t like not having a doctor there. She wrote home to the mission board in February 1926:
A nurse is not fitted to do a doctor’s work any more than a doctor to do a nurse’s, and I don’t wish to spend my life at a place where there is no doctor.
But there was a long delay in assigning a doctor permanently to Chissamba. Nearly a year later, in January 1927, Sibyl was writing to the mission board:
A doctor at Chissamba is so necessary. We should start some system of education along the lines of hygienic living and the prevention of disease but it is impossible if there is only one missionary in the medical department to do this.
Dr. Mary Cushman, a medical missionary, visited the Chissamba station for a few days in November of 1926. She wrote a letter to the American grassroots supporters of the Mission. (Side note: We have a pamphlet entitled “Suggestions as to Missionary Addresses”. Missionaries were expected to help with fundraising.) Sibyl gets several mentions. Here is one, when Dr. Cushman was talking about a long-term female patient:
She is the mother of two children, the youngest is a boy probably ten or twelve years old, for he is as tall as to his mother’s shoulder. She had no medical attendance when these children were born, and after the last one came she had trouble which has never left her. Six months ago she came to the hospital and has been under daily treatment ever since. At first there was a dreadful discharge, so offensive that no other patient could be put in the same room. Miss Hosking’s patient care has cleared all that up. But the pain persists. I found on examination that the uterus was inside out and has probably been so ever since the birth of that child. Of course it bleeds a great deal and when neglected gets to discharging that offensive pus. The drag on the ovaries and ligaments must be distressing. Attempts to replace the organ were unsuccessful, for it was swollen and the neck was tightly contracted about it. I hope further treatment can reduce the swelling and then by cutting the restricting band it ought to be reducable. The cut would have to be sewed up again after the organ is replaced. What a life of suffering, all for want of a doctor when her child was born.
It’s the smell that gets to me. But Sibyl dealt with it. Also remember that this was in the days before antibiotics and before pre-packaged sterile bandages. She wrote home in a letter of her own:
Oh, how many dressings of all kinds are needed here. Absorbent cotton, and all sorts of bandages and gauze.
Angola was where Sibyl met Fred. I think probably Fred came occasionally to Chissamba as Dr. Cushman did, and that Fred and Sibyl liked each other, and then saw more of each other at a 1926 post-Christmas gathering - maybe work, maybe fun, maybe both - and liked each other some more.
Fred’s assigned village, Dondi, was nearly 400 miles from Chissamba, so we have some lovely letters back and forth between him and Sibyl, which also include details of their daily lives and of the medical cases they worked on. I'm still working through them. Fred was eighteen years older than Sibyl, but that apparently was no obstacle, and they became engaged in July of 1927:
Sibyl was born August 27, 1897 in Quebec, a daughter of Henry and Elizabeth Hosking.
Sometimes in our letters she is called Sib, sometimes Bib. I haven’t yet worked out who called her what when. So I’m calling her Sibyl.
Why did she choose to become a missionary? She came from a religious family, and she was not the first missionary in the family. So the idea of being a missionary was familiar. But I don’t think any of her family was assigned to Africa, and Sibyl specifically requested Africa. Why Africa? I think that a couple named Kamba and Kathleen Simango may have gotten her interested. They were doing a fundraising tour for Africa, and Sibyl met them. You can read more about them in the Non-Family page for the Simangos.
We had three missionaries in the Stokey family: Fred and both of his wives. Each of them came to the work in a different way. Fred’s first wife, Mabel, was the child of missionaries in Africa, so becoming a missionary herself and going back to Africa would have seemed natural to her. Fred may have been interested in missionary work before he met Mabel, but she was what pulled him to Africa; practically the first thing he did upon arrival in Angola was to marry Mabel. But for Sibyl, Africa would have been new and very foreign, with no friends or family to welcome her there - although, on second thought, the Simangos were in Angola for a while.
Sibyl graduated from nursing school in Hamilton, Ontario, in May 1922, and at some point started the process of becoming a missionary. It was not a simple process. She applied to the Canadian mission board, requesting to be assigned to Angola. (It was Portuguese West Africa then, but I’m calling it Angola.) But because of the mission setup in Angola, she had to apply to both the Canadian mission board and the United States mission board. This she did, and managed to jump through whatever hoops there may have been.
Angola at this time was in Portuguese hands, and it was required that missionaries learn some Portuguese, so for each new missionary the voyage to Angola included a long stop in Lisbon.
Sibyl sailed from Canada to Portugal, with a stop in England on the way to pick up more passengers. It may have been on this voyage that she learned that she was prone to seasickness. She spent a few months in Lisbon, and then later in 1925 she finally went from Portugal south to Angola in a German steamer. (More seasickness.) In Angola she tackled learning the local language, Umbundu. She noted in a letter in February 1926 that she spent the first hour of the day after breakfast studying Umbundu.
She was assigned to the village of Chissamba. At first the doctor there was a Dr. Hall (I’m still working on finding a first name for him) but then, according to a 1927 book about the mission:
As Dr. Hall has been forced to resign for family reasons, no doctor is in residence at present (1927) and the work of treating the twenty thousand patients who came yearly to Dr. Hall devolves upon Miss Sibyl Hosking, a new arrival, who is already making her influence felt throughout the community.
There was some problem for which “for family reasons” appears to have been a euphemism, but I haven’t yet gotten the details on that. Whatever the story may have been, Dr. Hall’s departure was not planned, and Sibyl didn’t like not having a doctor there. She wrote home to the mission board in February 1926:
A nurse is not fitted to do a doctor’s work any more than a doctor to do a nurse’s, and I don’t wish to spend my life at a place where there is no doctor.
But there was a long delay in assigning a doctor permanently to Chissamba. Nearly a year later, in January 1927, Sibyl was writing to the mission board:
A doctor at Chissamba is so necessary. We should start some system of education along the lines of hygienic living and the prevention of disease but it is impossible if there is only one missionary in the medical department to do this.
Dr. Mary Cushman, a medical missionary, visited the Chissamba station for a few days in November of 1926. She wrote a letter to the American grassroots supporters of the Mission. (Side note: We have a pamphlet entitled “Suggestions as to Missionary Addresses”. Missionaries were expected to help with fundraising.) Sibyl gets several mentions. Here is one, when Dr. Cushman was talking about a long-term female patient:
She is the mother of two children, the youngest is a boy probably ten or twelve years old, for he is as tall as to his mother’s shoulder. She had no medical attendance when these children were born, and after the last one came she had trouble which has never left her. Six months ago she came to the hospital and has been under daily treatment ever since. At first there was a dreadful discharge, so offensive that no other patient could be put in the same room. Miss Hosking’s patient care has cleared all that up. But the pain persists. I found on examination that the uterus was inside out and has probably been so ever since the birth of that child. Of course it bleeds a great deal and when neglected gets to discharging that offensive pus. The drag on the ovaries and ligaments must be distressing. Attempts to replace the organ were unsuccessful, for it was swollen and the neck was tightly contracted about it. I hope further treatment can reduce the swelling and then by cutting the restricting band it ought to be reducable. The cut would have to be sewed up again after the organ is replaced. What a life of suffering, all for want of a doctor when her child was born.
It’s the smell that gets to me. But Sibyl dealt with it. Also remember that this was in the days before antibiotics and before pre-packaged sterile bandages. She wrote home in a letter of her own:
Oh, how many dressings of all kinds are needed here. Absorbent cotton, and all sorts of bandages and gauze.
Angola was where Sibyl met Fred. I think probably Fred came occasionally to Chissamba as Dr. Cushman did, and that Fred and Sibyl liked each other, and then saw more of each other at a 1926 post-Christmas gathering - maybe work, maybe fun, maybe both - and liked each other some more.
Fred’s assigned village, Dondi, was nearly 400 miles from Chissamba, so we have some lovely letters back and forth between him and Sibyl, which also include details of their daily lives and of the medical cases they worked on. I'm still working through them. Fred was eighteen years older than Sibyl, but that apparently was no obstacle, and they became engaged in July of 1927:
The announcement from Sibyl’s parents had him as Frederick, not Fred. At that point it may well be that even Sibyl thought his full name was Frederick.
They planned to be married on December 8, 1927, but at the request of the Mission Board they put it off until a doctor, Dr. Strangway, arrived to take over the hospital - finally! - in Chissamba. This, of course, wouldn’t happen anytime soon because Dr. Strangway first would have to go to Portugal for Portuguese language training. Neither Sibyl nor Fred was happy about this, but they acquiesced.
Sibyl continued in her work in Chissamba, which included teaching Sunday School (a.k.a. S.S.). There’s a passage in a letter she wrote to her father in December 1927, that makes me think about how Christianity, 1920s medicine, and traditional African life were woven together in Chissamba.
Last week a boy about seven years old died, who had been sick for about a few months. It is a very peculiar disease which he had and Dr. Cushman says that she has lost every case of that nature. He was certainly a very dear little boy called Cole (after Dr. Currie.) He was in my S.S. class and he was very bright could answer all the questions. He had two brothers who are in my class Paulu and Solomone. They are also fine lads. I take quite an interest in them because their mother died last year at the hospital because of Pneumonia. They were left as orphans, because their father has gone back to the ways of the world and now lives some distance away in a heathen village.
To-day in S.S. one lesson was about the calling of Samuel. I reminded the boys of Kole, one of themselves who had been called by God. He is happy and does not know pain or trouble anymore but we must remember that our life is not our own. We cannot buy it or save it with money or cattle or sheep or pigs. When God calls we must be ready to go to Him. It seemed a very real lesson indeed to tell these little children.
Sibyl did not mention either Fred or her engagement in this letter to her father. She knew that when she was writing to her family, the letter would be shown around, so the letters that I have seen from her to her family members are all very uplifting missionary letters, with no suggestion of issues with the Missionary establishment.
Dr. Strangway eventually arrived, in 1928. This is Sibyl’s story, but I want to add that this doctor proved to be a great success. He and his wife, Alice, stayed in Chissamba from 1928 until 1967, and the Dr. Walter Strangway Provincial Hospital in Angola was named for him. I found an article about their son David. He too was a doctor, so the Dr. Strangway referred to in this article is David.
Early investigation into chronic tropical diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness, leporacy and tuberculosis were done by his parents.
Dr. Strangway demonstrated statistics on the dramatic reduction in mortality that was achieved in the 1950s when his parent’s hospital at Chissamba in Bie Province began to have access to new modern medicines. Dr. Strangway’s mother worked on nutritional research and local herbal medical plants. His father not only built the 140 bed hospital and 83 village clinics, but conducted a remarkable 40,000 surgical operations over his 40 years in Angola.
The article is at:
https://dw.angonet.org/forumitem/dr-david-strangway-medical-research-angola-highlands-1900-1967
So Sibyl’s tenure in Chissamba would have seemed like barely a blip in its history. If all had gone as Sibyl and Fred had expected, they might have lived in Dondi raising their children as Walter and Alice Strangway raised young David in Chissamba. But one of the difficulties that cropped up with respect to the prospect of Fred and Sibyl getting married was the fact that the Canadian Mission Board wasn’t happy with Fred. I go into that in my write-up about Fred. But this issue did not change Sibyl’s mind about Fred..
They were married in Angola in May 1928 after Dr. Strangway arrived, and left Angola for Fred’s furlough and to decide what they would do in the future. A venerable older missionary in Chissamba, Helen Melville, wrote to Sibyl:
My dear Mrs. Stokey I do hope you will have the very best of journeys calm weather smooth sea and every pleasure. We do appreciate all the fine work you did at Chissamba you will long live in the hearts of the people. I cannot in my own mind reconcile why the dear Lord allowed you to be taken from us, I do not question His wisdom but I cannot just see it. He must have a fine piece of work for you to do.
Fred and Sibyl went to South Africa, and from there to England briefly, and then back to America. There was an offer of missionary work in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) with the Simango couple, but Fred found work that interested him in Westboro, Massachusetts, so they stayed there.
Fred and Sibyl visited Florida in 1933; I believe it was during this trip that they went to visit the family of Fred’s late first wife, Mabel. These were the Woodsides, who had retired to Florida after over thirty years of missionary work. Mrs. Woodside approved of Sibyl.
At some point Sibyl also met the Farmers, the parents of Kathleen Farmer Stokey, who was the wife of Fred’s brother Will. The relationship seems convoluted - the Farmers were Sibyl’s brother-in-law’s parents-in-law - but Sibyl liked them enough to send Mrs. Farmer a postcard from Florida:
June 6/33
Dear Mrs. Farmer,
I had thought to write you long before this. We have been wondering about your dear husband and do hope he is gaining some strength. We have had a fine trip so far, plan to arrive at Atlanta next Tuesday evening, the 13th. Visit for a few days with Will and hope the four children will be able to go with us to Woods Hole. We are very glad to know you and your family. Please give our kindest greetings to Kathleen, Ruth + Mr. Farmer. We have spoken frequently of our visit with you.
Sincerely, Sibyl Stokey
Apparently Sibyl had hit it off quite nicely with the Farmers, and I wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that both Sibyl and the Farmers were born outside of the US - Sibyl in Canada and the Farmers in England. Or perhaps it was just that both Sibyl and the Farmers were very nice people.
Or maybe Fred and Sibyl had been trying to help Mr. Farmer, the dear husband for whom Sibyl expressed hope that he was gaining some strength. Whatever was weakening him was serious; he died the following September. He was a Christian Scientist, and therefore he would not have wanted medical help. But Fred and Sibyl would have been used to helping people in Africa who were not accustomed to Western medicine, so maybe they were able to find creative ways to help that would have been acceptable to Mr. Farmer.
Unfortunately Fred was laid off from the hospital in Westboro; the family story is that he was not sufficiently supportive of James Michael Curley when Curley became governor in 1935. Sibyl did not have permission to work in the US, so she went back to Ontario and worked there while Fred was looking for work in Massachusetts.
Fred and Sibyl had one child, Alma Grace, who was born in Ontario in the spring of 1936. Did they hope for more children - younger brothers and sisters for their daughter? We don’t know, because in the spring of 1937, Sibyl developed peritonitis.
Here is an internet definition of peritonitis:
inflammation of the peritoneum, typically caused by bacterial infection either via the blood or after rupture of an abdominal organ.
Often the abdominal organ in question is the appendix, and I’ve always assumed that the appendix was what ruptured in Sibyl’s case, but I don’t know. This was before antibiotics were developed. Sibyl, as a nurse married to a doctor, apparently knew from the start that she might well die.
Little Alma Grace was about a year old. Sibyl needed to make sure her daughter was taken care of. If I’ve got the dates figured out correctly, Fred was having trouble finding a job. And anyway, Sibyl wanted a mother figure for her daughter. My impression is that Fred would not have felt any strong gender prejudices about being a mother as well as a father to Alma Grace. But Sibyl felt a woman was needed. Conceivably she also noted that, at 58 years old, Fred was no spring chicken.
So, for all or some of these reasons, in March 1937, Sibyl wrote a letter, which we still have (though I haven’t seen it) to her sister-in-law Kathleen Farmer Stokey, Will’s wife. Kathleen’s parents, whom Sibyl had liked, were no longer alive, but Kathleen was a lovely person, 48 years old and the mother of four children between 25 and 16, all very nice young people. Kathleen’s credentials as a mother were proven, and Sibyl asked her to take care of Alma Grace if Sibyl died.
Sibyl's illness went into remission during the summer, and Sibyl was home, but then it came back. Despite Fred's efforts - and I'm sure Fred's efforts were very, very good - she died on November 3, 1937.
She was buried in Canada, and her parents and siblings were eventually buried with her. Here is a picture of the headstone. Fred was buried elsewhere, but his name is there as her husband - still Frederick, as he was in the engagement announcement. I wonder if they just copy-and-pasted the name from the announcement. Sibyl is listed as Sibyl G. Hosking, not Sibyl Stokey, but all the women here are listed by their birth names.
They planned to be married on December 8, 1927, but at the request of the Mission Board they put it off until a doctor, Dr. Strangway, arrived to take over the hospital - finally! - in Chissamba. This, of course, wouldn’t happen anytime soon because Dr. Strangway first would have to go to Portugal for Portuguese language training. Neither Sibyl nor Fred was happy about this, but they acquiesced.
Sibyl continued in her work in Chissamba, which included teaching Sunday School (a.k.a. S.S.). There’s a passage in a letter she wrote to her father in December 1927, that makes me think about how Christianity, 1920s medicine, and traditional African life were woven together in Chissamba.
Last week a boy about seven years old died, who had been sick for about a few months. It is a very peculiar disease which he had and Dr. Cushman says that she has lost every case of that nature. He was certainly a very dear little boy called Cole (after Dr. Currie.) He was in my S.S. class and he was very bright could answer all the questions. He had two brothers who are in my class Paulu and Solomone. They are also fine lads. I take quite an interest in them because their mother died last year at the hospital because of Pneumonia. They were left as orphans, because their father has gone back to the ways of the world and now lives some distance away in a heathen village.
To-day in S.S. one lesson was about the calling of Samuel. I reminded the boys of Kole, one of themselves who had been called by God. He is happy and does not know pain or trouble anymore but we must remember that our life is not our own. We cannot buy it or save it with money or cattle or sheep or pigs. When God calls we must be ready to go to Him. It seemed a very real lesson indeed to tell these little children.
Sibyl did not mention either Fred or her engagement in this letter to her father. She knew that when she was writing to her family, the letter would be shown around, so the letters that I have seen from her to her family members are all very uplifting missionary letters, with no suggestion of issues with the Missionary establishment.
Dr. Strangway eventually arrived, in 1928. This is Sibyl’s story, but I want to add that this doctor proved to be a great success. He and his wife, Alice, stayed in Chissamba from 1928 until 1967, and the Dr. Walter Strangway Provincial Hospital in Angola was named for him. I found an article about their son David. He too was a doctor, so the Dr. Strangway referred to in this article is David.
Early investigation into chronic tropical diseases such as malaria, sleeping sickness, leporacy and tuberculosis were done by his parents.
Dr. Strangway demonstrated statistics on the dramatic reduction in mortality that was achieved in the 1950s when his parent’s hospital at Chissamba in Bie Province began to have access to new modern medicines. Dr. Strangway’s mother worked on nutritional research and local herbal medical plants. His father not only built the 140 bed hospital and 83 village clinics, but conducted a remarkable 40,000 surgical operations over his 40 years in Angola.
The article is at:
https://dw.angonet.org/forumitem/dr-david-strangway-medical-research-angola-highlands-1900-1967
So Sibyl’s tenure in Chissamba would have seemed like barely a blip in its history. If all had gone as Sibyl and Fred had expected, they might have lived in Dondi raising their children as Walter and Alice Strangway raised young David in Chissamba. But one of the difficulties that cropped up with respect to the prospect of Fred and Sibyl getting married was the fact that the Canadian Mission Board wasn’t happy with Fred. I go into that in my write-up about Fred. But this issue did not change Sibyl’s mind about Fred..
They were married in Angola in May 1928 after Dr. Strangway arrived, and left Angola for Fred’s furlough and to decide what they would do in the future. A venerable older missionary in Chissamba, Helen Melville, wrote to Sibyl:
My dear Mrs. Stokey I do hope you will have the very best of journeys calm weather smooth sea and every pleasure. We do appreciate all the fine work you did at Chissamba you will long live in the hearts of the people. I cannot in my own mind reconcile why the dear Lord allowed you to be taken from us, I do not question His wisdom but I cannot just see it. He must have a fine piece of work for you to do.
Fred and Sibyl went to South Africa, and from there to England briefly, and then back to America. There was an offer of missionary work in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) with the Simango couple, but Fred found work that interested him in Westboro, Massachusetts, so they stayed there.
Fred and Sibyl visited Florida in 1933; I believe it was during this trip that they went to visit the family of Fred’s late first wife, Mabel. These were the Woodsides, who had retired to Florida after over thirty years of missionary work. Mrs. Woodside approved of Sibyl.
At some point Sibyl also met the Farmers, the parents of Kathleen Farmer Stokey, who was the wife of Fred’s brother Will. The relationship seems convoluted - the Farmers were Sibyl’s brother-in-law’s parents-in-law - but Sibyl liked them enough to send Mrs. Farmer a postcard from Florida:
June 6/33
Dear Mrs. Farmer,
I had thought to write you long before this. We have been wondering about your dear husband and do hope he is gaining some strength. We have had a fine trip so far, plan to arrive at Atlanta next Tuesday evening, the 13th. Visit for a few days with Will and hope the four children will be able to go with us to Woods Hole. We are very glad to know you and your family. Please give our kindest greetings to Kathleen, Ruth + Mr. Farmer. We have spoken frequently of our visit with you.
Sincerely, Sibyl Stokey
Apparently Sibyl had hit it off quite nicely with the Farmers, and I wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that both Sibyl and the Farmers were born outside of the US - Sibyl in Canada and the Farmers in England. Or perhaps it was just that both Sibyl and the Farmers were very nice people.
Or maybe Fred and Sibyl had been trying to help Mr. Farmer, the dear husband for whom Sibyl expressed hope that he was gaining some strength. Whatever was weakening him was serious; he died the following September. He was a Christian Scientist, and therefore he would not have wanted medical help. But Fred and Sibyl would have been used to helping people in Africa who were not accustomed to Western medicine, so maybe they were able to find creative ways to help that would have been acceptable to Mr. Farmer.
Unfortunately Fred was laid off from the hospital in Westboro; the family story is that he was not sufficiently supportive of James Michael Curley when Curley became governor in 1935. Sibyl did not have permission to work in the US, so she went back to Ontario and worked there while Fred was looking for work in Massachusetts.
Fred and Sibyl had one child, Alma Grace, who was born in Ontario in the spring of 1936. Did they hope for more children - younger brothers and sisters for their daughter? We don’t know, because in the spring of 1937, Sibyl developed peritonitis.
Here is an internet definition of peritonitis:
inflammation of the peritoneum, typically caused by bacterial infection either via the blood or after rupture of an abdominal organ.
Often the abdominal organ in question is the appendix, and I’ve always assumed that the appendix was what ruptured in Sibyl’s case, but I don’t know. This was before antibiotics were developed. Sibyl, as a nurse married to a doctor, apparently knew from the start that she might well die.
Little Alma Grace was about a year old. Sibyl needed to make sure her daughter was taken care of. If I’ve got the dates figured out correctly, Fred was having trouble finding a job. And anyway, Sibyl wanted a mother figure for her daughter. My impression is that Fred would not have felt any strong gender prejudices about being a mother as well as a father to Alma Grace. But Sibyl felt a woman was needed. Conceivably she also noted that, at 58 years old, Fred was no spring chicken.
So, for all or some of these reasons, in March 1937, Sibyl wrote a letter, which we still have (though I haven’t seen it) to her sister-in-law Kathleen Farmer Stokey, Will’s wife. Kathleen’s parents, whom Sibyl had liked, were no longer alive, but Kathleen was a lovely person, 48 years old and the mother of four children between 25 and 16, all very nice young people. Kathleen’s credentials as a mother were proven, and Sibyl asked her to take care of Alma Grace if Sibyl died.
Sibyl's illness went into remission during the summer, and Sibyl was home, but then it came back. Despite Fred's efforts - and I'm sure Fred's efforts were very, very good - she died on November 3, 1937.
She was buried in Canada, and her parents and siblings were eventually buried with her. Here is a picture of the headstone. Fred was buried elsewhere, but his name is there as her husband - still Frederick, as he was in the engagement announcement. I wonder if they just copy-and-pasted the name from the announcement. Sibyl is listed as Sibyl G. Hosking, not Sibyl Stokey, but all the women here are listed by their birth names.
The daughter, Alma Grace, did go to Will and Kathleen in Atlanta after Sibyl’s death, but she didn’t stay there, because her Hosking grandparents felt she should be with them. She didn’t stay with them long either. Fred finally got a good job at the Springfield Armory in 1941, so Alma Grace grew up in Massachusetts with her father and with her Aunt Alma. She was later known in the Stokey family by her initials: AG.
I have included pages in this website about a couple of families that were adjacent to the Stokeys: Mama Margaret's family, the Provineses and the Graceys, and Kathleen's family, the Farmers and the Grays. I do not have a page for Sibyl's family, the Hoskings, because they are quite capable of taking care of their own family history. There are Hosking family reunions in Canada that AG has attended, and there is a Hosking Olympic snowboarder. The Hoskings are interesting people, but they don't need a distant not-quite-relative like me talking about their affairs.
I have included pages in this website about a couple of families that were adjacent to the Stokeys: Mama Margaret's family, the Provineses and the Graceys, and Kathleen's family, the Farmers and the Grays. I do not have a page for Sibyl's family, the Hoskings, because they are quite capable of taking care of their own family history. There are Hosking family reunions in Canada that AG has attended, and there is a Hosking Olympic snowboarder. The Hoskings are interesting people, but they don't need a distant not-quite-relative like me talking about their affairs.
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