Would you be surprised to learn that “tuberculosis today remains an epidemic in much of the world, causing the deaths of nearly one-and-a-half million people each year*.”?

I certainly was.

Tuberculosis impacted my family tree, taking the lives of my maternal grandfather’s sister Myrtle (1917) and his father James Walton (1911).

Others in my tree were also affected.

My second great-grandmother’s 53 year old brother Klas Alfrid Landstrom died at Chicago’s Municipal Tuberculosis Sanatorium in 1923:

I thought TB was a disease of the past. It isn’t.

*Source: Stop TB Partnership