Julia Gensman Stam

GARBER SENTINEL Garber, Garfield Co., OK

December 19, 1912 page 1, column 4

Submitted by: Emily Jordan

© Glenn

Suicide

When the crowd was about the largest Saturday word was passed that Mrs. Hiram Stam had just committed suicide by hanging herself. Mr. Stam was here in town and he was notified at once and left hurriedly for home. Men gathered in little groups and talked in low voices of the details then known. Everybody was shocked and everybody sympathized with the husband who was left with five little children, the oldest being only seven and the youngest a baby of three months.

After doing her housework with her usual neatness, and after her husband had left for town on business, Mrs. Stam put the baby to sleep in its bed, and kissing the children, she told them that she was going to the barn to gather some eggs. She has been afflicted with cerebral disease and her next act was the sad and final result from it effecting her mind. Tying a new rope around her neck, and on the outside of the high collar of her husband's big coat that she was wearing, she carefully wifed the knot. The other end of the rope she fastened to a rafter in the top of the granary. The leap was a distance of 6 or 7 feet and death was evidently instantaneous.

Some time later a neighbor boy who came over and was playing in the yard with the children inquired where their mother was and one of them answered that she was tied in the barn. He investigated and then phoned his father that Mrs. Stam had hung herself. Help soon arrived on the sad scene but life had long been extinct.

Mrs. Julia Stam was the oldest daughter of Conrad Gensman, now a business man of Enid, but formerly a farmer of this vicinity, homesteading the Will Jackson farm. She was born in Sedgwick county, Kas., in 1884, came to Oklahoma in 1894. She was married to Hiram Stam in 1904. She leaves her husband and three daughters and two sons, a father, two brothers and two sisters. The funeral services were held at the home four miles southwest of town at 10 o'clock a.m. Monday, Rev. Woods of the Christian church officiating. Interment was made in the Garber cemetery.

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