New to You is this week’s topic for week 38 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge. My paternal grandfather, Frederick Wagner Turner, was an avid outdoorsman. He loved fishing and hunting, and it’s difficult to find pictures of him where he’s not proudly holding up a massive fish or posing with a gun or some sort of dead critter. Awhile back I learned that he accidentally shot himself while he was hunting. I wasn’t sure when this happened, and only knew a few details written by his sister, Edith. Recently I found the accident mentioned in some old newspapers, so while the information is old, it is definitely new to me!
The hunting accident occurred when he was still married to his first wife, Edith Kierstead. His sister, Edith Turner Waite, wrote about it in the genealogy album she assembled:
Fred enjoyed the family farm. He loved to hunt. One time out he stopped to rest. The shotgun leaning against a tree fell down and discharged hitting him mainly in the left arm. Edith heard him calling for help in the woods. Her first thought, it was a crow she was hearing. Fred was found and taken care of. Until the day he died, some shotgun pellets remained in the lining of his heart.
I couldn’t find any mention of his accident in Maine newspapers when I searched a couple of years ago. I never thought about looking in the Amesbury, Massachusetts newspapers where his parents lived. Bingo! There it was – a short article from September 25, 1930, when my grandfather was 24, and had been married a little less than a year. He was visiting his grandparents in Mount Vernon at the time and suffered a broken arm. The initial article said his condition wasn’t serious.
With this new information, I searched newspapers in Kennebec County, Maine around the same date, and did find an article in the Daily Kennebec Journal from Wednesday, September 24, 1930, reporting that the accident occurred on Tuesday. More details about the accident were in this paper. He was chopping wood, not hunting. His gun was leaning against some rocks, and when he saw it slipping, he grabbed for it, and it discharged. He walked over a mile to get back to his grandparents’ house!
Within a couple of days, his condition was upgraded to serious, perhaps because doctors realized he had shotgun pellets either close to or in the lining of his heart. I was unable to find additional details in any of the Kennebec County newspapers.
On September 30, 1930, five days after the initial report of his accident, Fred’s condition had improved.
Fred’s arm apparently suffered from complications because four years later, he needed another surgery. The December 22, 1934 edition of the Amesbury Daily News reported that his surgery was related to a previous gunshot injury.
I wish I could say his surgery was the last of my grandfather’s arm troubles, but it wasn’t. A little over a year later, the poor guy was injured in a car accident, breaking the same arm!
I don’t know whether my grandfather Fred was lucky or unlucky. Maybe he was a little of both? Getting shot was definitely unlucky, but he was incredibly lucky to survive – especially since he had to trek a mile through the woods with a broken arm and shotgun pellets either close to or in the lining of his heart. He’s unlucky that he broke his arm a year after his surgery, but in a time before seat belts, he was fortunate to walk away from that accident too. Lucky or unlucky, he was a tough guy!
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