Your Stories
The 1918 Spanish Flu had a great impact on Canada and the world. Second-hand knowledge has been passed down from grandparents to children to grandchildren, from friend to friend. Here, the narrative continues with a collection of reader-submitted stories about how the Spanish Flu touched the lives of people they knew and loved.
My Grandmother Louisa Frieda lived through “the Flu” and she talked to me about it in the ‘80’s.
She was born in 1903 in Nain Labrador and was living there 15 or 16 years old went the Flu hit hard she told me.
I wish i had asked her more about this. But she did say. “A lot of people were sick and dying in nearly every house, dead people everywhere”
I asked was she afraid. “Not really more concerned and we didn’t know the seriousness of the Flu”
I think she never got sick.
Submitted on Tuesday, November 27, 2018 by Greg Wiggins
Alanna Mitchell’s story on the Spanish Flu finally cleared up a mystery for me. According to it, some people wore cotton bags filled with camphor in the belief it would ward off the virus. My grandmother, who would have been 20 years old in 1918, made me wear a camphor bag when I was a child, claiming it would keep me from getting sick. I took some teasing over it at public school and figured it was something she’d thought up on her own. Now I realize she’d probably heard about it during the influenza pandemic. Thanks so much for the information.
Submitted on Sunday, September 16, 2018 by Jil McIntosh, Oshawa, Ontario