I lost a Grandfather (in New York) and two Great-Uncles (in Florida) to that flu epidemic... Two more Great-Uncles to the effects of Mustard Gas in WW1 a few years later!
Thanks ExSES, and good point -- as Gina Kolata pointed out in her book about influenza, the Spanish Lady flu which hit right at and just after the end of The Great War (WWI) was the worst of a five year (two ahead, two behind) rise and fall of lethality in what is, after all, an annual happening. It's something the world has learned to live with, but many die worldwide every year. The difference is, in 1900 the population of the Earth was perhaps one billion, now it is perhaps seven billion. Also, flu epidemics have risen to (as the linked table calls it) pandemic levels, due to a rise in lethality. One outbreak in the 1890s was similar in effect to the Spanish Lady in 1918, and was somehow similar enough to their immune systems that those who had survived the 1890s outbreak never even caught cold in 1918. Anecdotally, the 1872-73 outbreak was one of the nasty ones (lost family in that one), but the Spanish Lady was perhaps worse, or perhaps just got more publicity, resulting in a convenient forgetting of the rise and fall of lethality of the 19th c flu epidemics. The death toll in 1918 was in the tens of millions worldwide, estimates go as high as 100 million, but that number is difficult for me to believe -- relatives (now deceased of old age and whatnot) who lived through it didn't seem to have thought much of it, when asked about it, said, more or less, oh yeah, that's right, there was a bad one that year. A great number of its victims though were in just the places where accurate numbers are not available or easy to reconstruct (India, China, elsewhere in rural Asia, Africa, etc). My guess is, the results were skewed because so many people's opinions of it have been formed by the impact on urban populations in the US (NYC, Philadelphia, etc) and postwar Europe.