In my 15 years of researching ancestors, I’ve viewed many death certificates, some are for family who lived before my time and some were peripheral connections.

When Martha Elizabeth (Richart) Herriott died in Tecumseh, Michigan on April 15, 1910 she was 84 years old – an impressive age for a woman born in 1825. Her death certificate contains no familiar disease or ailment to explain her passing. Instead, her physician recorded a cause of death that sounds almost poetic more than a century later: “Failure of the power of life.” This was an old medical expression for what we might now describe as the frailty and natural decline of advanced age – a time when there was no particular illness left to name, only a body that had simply reached the end of it’s ability to carry on.