San Francisco Earthquake
This page was created August 4, 2009
This time the topic is the Great Earthquake in San Francisco in 1906.
On April 18, 1906 the city was destroyed by the earthquake and the subsequent fires.
While original casualty reports were about 468-700 maximum so that people in the East would feel that they had taken some precautions and they would therefore contribute money to the rebuilding--
At the time, only 376 deaths were reported;the figure was fabricated by government officials who felt that reporting the true death toll would hurt real estate prices and efforts to rebuild the city; additionally, hundreds of casualties in Chinatown went ignored and unrecorded.
More recent investigations have found that the death toll was at least 3,000 and some reports state as high as 4,000.
Now I know for certain that several of our ancestors were found at one time or another in California.
This could explain someone that seemingly disappears...
There is a lady named Gladys Hansen who decided to make it her mission in life to track down the names of the casualties and she is still working on it.
Here is a link to a page listing those people- it might bear viewing if you had people there during that time who vanished.