Genealogy Chat

You can still be churched today, if you want. It has gone out of fashion, but the service is still available. Traditionally it took place 40 days after the birth, immediately before the baby's baptism, and was a blessing and purification of the mother.

Paul

is your g grandfather's baptism in London on the London records on ancestry?


If so, it might say on there when he was born.



Interesting to read that churching went on into the 1970's ........ My sister-in-law had her children in the 1950s, and I don't remember her being churched.




sylvia

hello

i had my children in the early 1970 s in london and some mothers mainly catherlic were churched so astra it was not just in the backwoods that this happened

sally w

I was reading last week of a woman who had twins then triplets 9 months later they say she got pregnant again after two weeks !!!!

Hi Rose. Unfortunately I have no birth certificates. Curiously though my g-grandfather was baptised twice, firstly in Ireland and then in London.

Oh my word Sylvia. You have just stirred some memories. When my daughter was born in 1970 and I was preparing to leave hospital I said to one of the other mothers on the ward that I would be able to take my new born out the following day if the weather remained warm and sunny. She said that I shouldn't think about going out until myself and the baby had been 'churched'.
I really hadn't got a clue what she was talking about but the 4 or 5 other new mother's on the ward all agreed with her and said that they would all be 'churched' before they did anything else. I was completely lost.until one of them explained that all new mothers should be blessed and there was a special service every Tuesday morning at the Parish Church specifically for this purpose.
Being the heathen that I am I didn't go. The service itself died out completely not long after.
So this practice existed in the backwoods of Lincolnshire until the early 1970's.

The GRO(I) index thru 1958 (excl N. Ireland post-partition) is available at:
https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/list#page=1®ion=BRITISH_ISLES

One can purchase certs (or cheaper still, the uncertified images of the rego) via:
http://www.groireland.ie/

I agree that it would have been perfectly possible that she did get pregnant very soon after the first birth, may be only days.

The suggestion that women wait 6 weeks is fairly recent.


More important to women back then was the requirement to go to church to be "churched" ................ women who had given birth were not considered clean until that had happened. Churching was usually done within 2 weeks after a birth ............ or as soon as a woman could get out of bed and make it to the church.


Of course, not all men were willing to wait until churching had taken place ...... they would demand their rights whenever they wanted them.



I know that churching still took place in parts of Lancashire until at least 1940.



sylvia

my sister was born in aug 1955 & my brother born june 1956, only 10 month's between them, so my mum got pregnant 4 week's after my sister's birth.my brother was full term.

I have a friend who gave birth to her second child exactly 9 mths after the birth of her first. She had no medical help and gave birth at home completely unexpectedly. The baby was small but healthy, didn't require any hospitalization. A complete surprise to everyone...including the mother :-)

When did dogs start getting baptised? I know my friend had a birthday party for her poodle, but really ......

Paul,

You say the dogs are on the baptism records. What dates are actually listed on the birth certs?

Rose

Tori Spelling currently pregnant. The baby was conceived 4 weeks after she gave birth.

Rose

Sorry, I've just thought that my reply might sound as though I'm disagreeing with all the others. I'm not; just that sadly, women didn't have it as good as fortunately most of us do today (by comparisson).

Sad to say, I'm with Reggie and Joan on this. It was the wife's duty to submit whenever required. I've just Googled to see if I can find out how enshrined in law regarding marriage this was. Even thirty years ago, a lady I knew said that she didn't always want sex with her husband everytime he was demanding it. I was shocked and really upset for her but she explained she felt she had no choice as it was considered a requirement as part of her marriage duties.

Attitudes really have changed in the last few decades. The previous ones had been on the go for a very long time.

I'm now going to look back at a family on my tree to look at the reg quarters to calculate intervals between births as they were a very large family. She was married age 19 in 1874 just before the birth of her first child. She subsequently had children in 1896,1897,1899,1901,1902,1904,1905,1907,1908 (died),1909,late 1910/early 1911,1912,1914,1916,1921. She had her last child when she was forty-six so had sixteen children who lived long enough to have their births recorded in about twenty-seven years

Not my idea of fun.

Yes, conception it is possible, but this child survived for 6 weeks it seems. Even at best 30-32 weeks' gestation I just don't see it. The baby would not suck and swallow adequately apart from anything else.
Jan

The fact that women are advised not to have intercourse for six weeks after giving birth doesn't mean that they all followed that advice! Also, I would think that it is comparitively modern advice (post-NHS?) and unlikely to have been given in 1868, particularly to poor women who probably never went near a doctor.

There were two sisters at school with me who were barely ten months apart, so, in the above case, conception in the last week of January and birth at 7 months. Not desirable, but possible - just!

Birth dates were sometimes falsified to make them fit within the 42 days allowed before registration must have been done.

My friend tells me that her father ( b. 1920s) had '2 'birthdays because of this.

Gwyn

He was born in Ireland, Reggie, so the family moved to Whitechapel between the two births.

I would seriously doubt that in the late 1860's women were given advice about not having intercourse for a specific length of time after giving birth. The husband would be claiming his 'rights' as soon as he thought fit

Is there a cert for the older child's birth?