Black female, born about 1873 in Florida. she died in Pensacola Hospital on 27 December 1928 of tetanus caused by an injury to her leg and hip. She was about 55 years old at the time of her death and married, though her spouse’s name is not given. Dr. William D. Nobles signed her death certificate and she was buried in the Escambia County Poor Farm cemetery by T.M. Lloyd. The informant on her death certificate was the hospital.
Elizabeth has proven elusive as, without the name of a spouse or any further family information, it is not currently possible to identify her out of several Elizabeth Browns in the state of the right age. I find a Charles Brown in the 1927 Pensacola City Directory, with Elizabeth listed as his spouse, living at 221 Hayne St., but I cannot locate Charles after that to try to identify him as Elizabeth’s widower.
The fact that the hospital was the informant, rather than her husband or a child, combined with her burial at the Poor Farm, speaks volumes about Elizabeth’s situation at the time of her death. She would have been ill for over two weeks, suffering from a condition for which there was no cure.
The only information I can find is an article in The Pensacola Journal from December 12 which informs that Sam Wethers was arrested for aggravated assault and held with the possibility of a charge of manslaughter after hitting Elizabeth Brown in the knee with a brick. She had gone to the hospital after lockjaw set in. This sounds like our Elizabeth, but if there was further action against Sam Wethers or information about Elizabeth’s death, the paper does not appear to have covered it.
SOURCES:
Florida Certificate of Death for Elizabeth Brown (No. 19312), Florida Deaths, 1877-1939. Database. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org : 14 June 2016. Index based upon data collected by the Genealogical Society of Utah, Salt Lake City.
Ancestry.com. U.S., City Directories, 1822-1995 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011.
“Blow on Knee Brings Charge,” The Pensacola Journal, 12 DEC 1928, p. 10.