In yesterday’s New York Times, there was a letter to the editor in which the writer said she “often wondered if some X-linked disorder” was responsible for the deaths of three generations of male children, sons of Caroline Ingalls, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Rose Wilder Lane. You can see the letter HERE; you might have to register before reading. The article which prompted Dr. Smith to write can also be found in the NYT archives.

In part, Dr. Smith wrote: [Laura's] only brother, a sickly infant, died at 9 months of age in 1876; her only son died in the month he was born in 1889; her only grandson died soon after birth in 1910. Dr. Smith admitted to me that the only Ingalls / Wilder / Lane research she based her letter on was reading William Anderson’s Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Biography. A juvenile biography at that.

There is nothing to suggest that Freddy Ingalls had been a “sickly infant.” Laura’s only account of Freddy’s death is found in her handwritten Pioneer Girl manuscript, in which she writes: Little Brother was not well and the Dr. came. I thought that would cure him as it had Ma when the Dr. came to see her. But little Brother got worse instead of better and one awful day he straightened out his little body and was dead.

Freddy’s death certificate at the Wabasha County (Iowa) courthouse gives his cause of death as “diarrhora” (spelled diarrhea today). Genetics or bad water?

Less is known about the death of Laura’s son: Laura was doing her own work again one day three weeks later when the baby was taken with spasms, and he died so quickly that the doctor was too late. (The First Four Years, “A Year of Grace”).

Even less is known about Rose’s baby. Rose Wilder Lane wrote about it in only two letters. All she said what that she had had a son, and that he died. As William Holtz wrote in Ghost in the Little House, there is not enough to even know if the child was a live birth, still birth, or miscarriage.

This doesn’t rule out an X-chromosome disorder, and Dr. Smith certainly isn’t the first person to wonder about the possibility. Yes, Eliza and Caroline Quiner were sisters who married Ingalls brothers, and Eliza Ingalls had three sons. The way these things work, Caroline could have carried and passed along a genetic abnormality that Eliza wasn’t born with.

Smith also wrote that the death [sic?] of Rose’s child “deprived Charles and Caroline Ingalls of their only great-grandchild.” It may have deprived Caroline Ingalls of the joy of having a great-grandchild, but Charles Ingalls had died seven years prior to Rose’s marriage, so I honestly don’t see how he was deprived, except, of course, genetically.