Managing illness episodes is an important component of protecting independence. This brings to mind other characteristics of rural white elders.

They lived in small homogeneous rural communities where many were related to each other by either birth or marriage. So in the early 1900s, they worked together to plant and harvest crops, to care for their sick, and to bury those who died. They relied upon each other in times of hardship as well as shared times of joy and success.

Copyright 2000