Bertha, and her twin sister Anna, were the eldest children in the family and she was also the first to die young. Unlike the majority of her siblings, however, she did manage to marry and have a child - Grant Welch. Her son was born in June of 1905. In about September she became ill with tuberculosis of the lungs. She died in November at the age of 25. At the end of the following May, 1906, her son came down with lung fever and died three weeks later. He was two days shy of his first birthday. These were the first in a long line of deaths in the Mailahn family.
