A recent find, the death certificate of my great-great-grandfather Jim Kinney's brother, Zachary Taylor Kinney. cause of death was pellagra, an all too common malady in the southeast US and parts of Europe prior to World War II. It was especially common among older people who had lost their teeth at a time when dental care and dentures were not widely available, forcing them to subsist almost entirely on corn mush. Corn is rich in niacin but in a form which is not easily absorbed in its natural state. Native Americans had long ago learned the trick of washing maize in wood ash lye to release the niacin, but curiously European settlers never bothered to learn it from them.
