Charles Blondin

popular name: Nancy Martin

date_of_death: May 25, 1857

age: 24

cause_of_death: Yellow Fever

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Silas Martin was a successful sea captain and trader. The one thing he hated about his job was missing his family for long stretches of time. So when his son John and daughter Nancy (Nance to her friends) asked to accompany their father on his next voyage he did not hesitate to add them to the crew. When they set sail in early 1857, Nance took ill about three months into the trip. Silas detoured and sailed into Cardenas, Cuba in search of medical care but it was too late - Nancy succumbed shortly upon arrival. Rather than having Nancy buried on foreign soil or buried at sea, Captain Silas was determined to return to Wilmington for a proper burial with her family. The issue was how to keep the body preserved for the voyage home. They decided on a large rum barrel as a makeshift coffin filled with liquor to preserved the body. The thought of her body sloshing around in a cask during rough seas was too much for her father and brother, so it was decided that a chair would be placed in the cask, nailed in place and Nance seated and tied into the chair to keep her secure. Rather than disturbing the remains, upon returning to Wilmington, Silas had Nance buried in the cask in the port city’s Oakdale Cemetery.

popular name: Quinta Maggia McDonald

date_of_death: December 7, 1929

age: 29

cause_of_death: Radium sarcoma, industrial poisoning

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Quinta Maggia McDonald was the middle child of seven Maggia sisters; listed in order of age: Louise, Clara, Albina, Mollie, Quinta, Irma and Josephine. Children of Italian immigrants, Albina, Mollie, Quinta and Irma all worked in the radium-dial factory. Quinta was recruited to work at the United States Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey as a dial-painter. Like her sisters she would end up paying the price. The initial effects of radium seemed harmless, and the substance was popular amongst the younger girls in the factory. They would go home from a day of painting with their clothes glowing from the radium exposure. Some would even paint the buttons on their dresses or their nails, but the joy of the radium glow was short lived. Long-term radiation sickness symptoms soon became present among many of the women who worked with radium paint. Common issues included bone cancer, anemia, lesions, and sores. These problems were exhibited in Amelia Maggia, the first dial painter to die from radiation sickness. After Amelia's death, Quinta initially went to the doctor complaining of dental pain where her teeth began to just drop out of her mouth. Unlike her sister before her, she received a diagnoses of radium poisoning and was told there was no cure. Sometime later she noticed pain in her ankles, legs and hips and was put into plaster casts to keep her immobile in the chance this might bring some relieve. Upon her final hospitalization the doctors noticed a large sarcoma on her leg - the kind of bone tumor that killed a fellow Radium Girl a year before. She eventually lapsed into a coma and died at the age of 29 leaving behind two young children.

popular name: Élisabeth de Demidoff

date_of_death: March 27, 1818

age: 41

cause_of_death: Unkown

claim_to_fame: The Odd and the Interesting

best_know_for: Baroness Elizaveta Alexandrovna Stroganova was a Russian aristocrat of the Stroganov family. By birth she belonged to the highest nobility of the capital. Elizabeth's father was the owner of the Taman and Kynovsky factories and more than half a million acres of land. Her mother Elizaveta Alexandrovna Zagryazhskaya was a lady in waiting and a famous beauty of Catherine II's court. At age 17 she married Count Nikolai Nikitich Demidov and they had two children - Pavel (Paul) (1798–1840) and Anatoly (Anatole) (1812–1869). They were of completely different characters and often lived apart. She was beautiful, light and witty, and her husband more introspective, and so they soon grew bored with each other and they separated and she returned to live in Paris, where she died in 1818 and was buried in the Père Lachaise where she rests in the cemetery's largest mausoleum.