Family Genealogy Hunt Connects with Murder-Suicide

The records of the Abernethy and Whisnant clans show hard-working, respectable, religious people. So how did one of these families become connected with a lurid murder-suicide that made the front page of the Washington Post and other newspapers across America, even though it occurred in Savannah, Georgia.

The story and its characters became one of those family skeletons that no one passed down to descendants. That its outlines can be told now shows the power of the Internet and, especially, search engines such as Google in unraveling mysteries.

This much is known.

Eugene Whisnant, older brother of Edna Whisnant Abernethy, graduated from VPI early in the 1900s and found a job as an engineer in Savannah, Georgia. There he met and courted a young woman named Katherine Kittles. During the summer of 1906, he contracted typhoid fever and returned to Charlotte, to his parents' house in the prosperous Fourth Ward. In late July or early August he was deteriorating fast, so he asked the young woman to come to Charlotte. According to newspaper accounts (in 1913), on his deathbed he asked her to marry him so that he could die knowing that she was his wife. He died five days later.

That's a very sad, romantic story with no salacious details or wrong-doing on the part of family members, so why wasn't it told? Read on.

Seven years later (in the summer of 1913) Katherine Kittles Whisnant carefully purchased cartridges for her revolver that she kept in her purse, traveled to her doctor's office with a female companion, asked the doctor to write prescriptions for her, and then shot at him six times while chasing him around the medical offices. She made sure that he was dead, laid her body across his, and shot herself in the head.

The Whisnant family evidently was so embarrassed by the coverage that the story became unmentionable. How was it found? Many years ago Eugene's younger sister, Helen, told me that the family never got over Eugene's death (that was easy to believe) and that he had a girlfriend whom she seemed to remember was Spanish but she didn't know what happened to her. She indicated the family didn't think much of her. Since Helen was old enough to remember both the deathbed marriage and the later tragedy, let's call this an obfuscation.

The story would have ended there except that in July I found Eugene's father's family Bible and flipped to see if any records were in it. Surprise: there was the marriage date of Eugene and Katherine Kittles! After it was a brief notation that Eugene died the same month. It took a Google search of her name linked with his to unearth the deathbed marriage and the 1913 events

Don't you wonder what other stories are out there?

Abernethy One of NC's First Modern Doctors

The North Carolina Medical School (originally the old Presbyterian Hospital) as it appeared in Charlotte near the turn of the twentieth century.
The North Carolina Medical College as it made its first appearance on the campus of Davidson College in Davidson in the 1890s.

After World War I when returning American soldiers suffered the plague of the "Spanish" flu (as it was then called), Dr. Miles Burwell Abernethy of Reidsville, NC, was put on the U.S. Department of Health's list of physicans approved to minister on troop ships in New York harbor and elsewhere. Only doctors trained in modern medical practice were so honored. He was called to duty in New York.

Miles Burwell Abernethy first took premed courses at Davidson College under the tutelage of Dr. J.P Munroe, who advertised those classes as early as 1896, when "Burwell" (as he was called) was a farm boy of 15. Probably Dr. Munroe recruited him as an undergraduate while he was still a promising day student, living on a farm (property now under Lake Norman) in Cornelius.

After the clinical section of the Medical College moved its upper classes to Charlotte in 1902, Dr. Abernethy must have moved with it and been among its first students, as he graduated around 1905. Family descendents know why the move to Charlotte was significant for him: while he was a student in the building on West Trade Street, he met a young woman then studying music at Charlotte Female Seminary (aka Queens College) who was to become his wife in 1907.

The Medical College existed in Charlotte for a scant 11 years, but that was time enough for Dr. Abernethy to see Edna Whisnant not far from her home near the College wheeling Isaac Marshall, her much younger brother (born in 1901 when Edna was 16), in a baby carriage . He enquired after the baby's health, not knowing she wasn't the mother. And then. . .

If Not for Pearl Harbor, I Wouldn't Be Here

Strange to imagine the scene on December 8th.

My 20-year-old father, Al Stone, sits in a classroom at Cleveland College (now part of Case Western Reserve) as the professor turns up the radio to broadcast FDR's famous "Day of Infamy" speech. He and most of his classmates head for enlistment as soon as possible. The Army Air Corps rejects him for his eyesight. His father says the only real men are in the Marines anyway.

South to Parris Island, then to Camp Lejune, the USO, and a first-year high school teacher with red hair and the last name of Abernethy. Voila.

How many more thousands of World War II stories are like this?