Mother of the Toledo Quads Dies From Gunshot

Yolanda Campbell Lifter sent me a link to this death certificate on FamilySearch for the mother of the Toledo  quadruplets born in 1903.

I just concluded the mother of the quads died of complications of childbirth or perhaps in the flu epidemic as she was not in the 1920 census. Wrong.

She was shot.

And not by her husband.

Turns out her death was more dramatic than I thought. A search on Genealogybank.com located this newspaper clipping mentioning her death:

Date: Tuesday, June 5, 1917  

Paper: Grand Rapids Press (Grand Rapids, MI) 

-obtained 

on Genealogybank.com.

Apparently Spychalski refused to elope with John Cziehan and he killed her and then shot himself.

Sad on so many levels--just goes to show that one never knows what one will find.