Roy William Smeds

Roy William Smeds was the third child of Jakob Herman Smeds (Jack Smeds) and Anna Gustava Rautiainen (Annie Rautiainen), born after his sisters Sylvia and Lillian, and followed by his younger brother Lawrence. He is not to be confused with his double first cousin Roy William Smeds, son of Vilhelm Smeds (William Smeds) and Maria Rautiainen. The latter was born in 1913 and was apparently named in honor of the first, who had passed away in infancy.

Roy was born 13 July 1909 in San Francisco -- meaning he came into the world at approximately the midpoint of his parents’ eleven years of residence in the city. The baby did not thrive. In later years neither Annie nor Jack would readily speak of their loss, and the dates of his birth and death were long unknown within the Smeds clan, except that the little boy had lived and died in “about 1908 or 1909.” Even his name usually went unmentioned. The precise stats on this webpage are derived from his entries in the California Birth Index and the San Francisco County Death Index. The proximate cause of death was dehydration and malnutrition from chronic (and often projectile) vomiting. These symptoms are consistent with pyloric stenosis. This condition is strongly associated with a genetic defect common among males of Finnish extraction. The syndrome causes the muscles that close the sphincter at the base of the stomach to overdevelop. Within a few days or weeks of birth, the sphincter can reach the point where it fails to relax open when it is time for the stomach contents to move into the small intestine. Often the pyloric muscles spasm, leading to the vomiting. Later in the Twentieth Century that doctors became skilled at correcting the problem through surgical means. Two great-grandsons of Vilhelm Smeds both suffered from pyloric stenosis in their infancies in the summers of 1979 and 1981, respectively, and underwent such surgery. The procedure did involve danger in the sense that it involved anesthesia and abdominal surgery on an infant, but these risks were successfully dealt with, as they usually are in modern-day cases. Little Roy did not have the benefit of such advanced medical techniques. Unable to keep his mother’s milk down, he slowly declined, to the horror of his parents.

Roy died 4 October 1909 in San Francisco at less than three months of age.

Click here to go back to Roy’s father's page, and here to go back to his mother’s page. To return to the Smeds Family History main page, click here.