Genealogy Chat

I was happily transcribing my freebmd page today and thought what a lot of "males" and "females" on one page! I bet that is why I can't find some of mine - probably registered before they were named.

Then, something odd occured to me - I am transcribing deaths not births! Surely somebody must have know what a dead person's christian name was if they knew their surname? And what happened if nobody knew either name (perhaps a tramp)? Would their death have been registered as "Unknown Male" or "Unknown Female"?

Have to go now but will be doing a search for "Unknown" deaths when I get back.

Very sad....I suppose there would have been still borns too, and ones which died very shortly after birth

Joan

Are you doing oldies? Ones that have no age at birth, that is, before the mid-late 1860s.

The "males" and "females" would be infants who died before they were baptised/registered, I think. Born living, but died shortly after.

Once ages did start being recorded, they reveal quite an instructive picture about child mortality. A search at FreeBMD for deaths for a relatively common surname for a period of a few years (after 1866) produces a list that is full of 0s and 1s in the age column.

Here's an especially awful example for one of my surnames:

Deaths Jun 1870
Hill Charles 0 Stockton 10a 49
Hill Edward 2 Auckland 10a 131
Hill Hannah Elizabeth 0 Stockton 10a 42
Hill James Henry 0 Darlington 10a 11
Hill Luther 1 Stockton 10a 43
Hill Ninian 0 S. Shields 10a 343
Hill Sarah Ann 1 Durham 10a 189
Hill Thomas 1 Stockton 10a 72

(Oops, I just realized I'd forgotten to remove the county filter before doing the search -- those were all in Co. Durham alone.)

I know of one child my Hill grx2 grparents had who was born and died between 1861 and 1871 (from spotting an unusual given name in the index), and two who were living in 1851 and gone by 1861. Who knows how many others?

Look at a similar list for the early 1900s, and you see two things: people were living longer, and fewer children were dying in infancy.

We have to remember that if all the children who died in infancy in the past -- even in the recent past! -- had lived to adulthood and reproduced, it would be standing room only on earth today. ;)

Once children start surviving at higher rates, couples start limiting their births. Thank goodness!

It seems strange to us that an informant would not know a first name but did know a surname, but even when I was young Mum always referred to people by their surnames, .... Mrs Carpenter, Mrs Powell etc, ...even though she knew them quite well.
Eventually close neighbours were called by their first names....but it was a long time coming.

Gwyn

Carrying on from your remark Gwyn, I remember grandma calling people by their husbands names also ie Mrs Joseph Kaye, Mrs Bob Turner are 2 that spring to mind and she also knew them very well.

Christine

Thinking about it after I posted, I did wonder if they were infants but would still have thought that then (1838) they would have been baptised as without the baptism they could not have been buried in consecrated ground.

Gwyn,

Yes, I remember that - I still called our next door neighbour Mrs Powell in my teens, even though her daughter and I had grown up together.

I have just done a search for deaths, Surname: Unknown, Name:Male, from 1838 to 1860 - there were 9145 results!

Potty, if you are doing pre-1866 deaths, do a quick search at FreeBMD to confirm what I said about "male" and "female".

A search for Hill deaths, given name "male", 1867 to 1885 gives several dozen results -- every single one of them aged 0. The ones you are looking at would virtually certainly be infants in every case.

Interesting -- on a search for surname Unknown, FreeBMD says:

Search for
Type: Deaths
Surname: unknown
Start date: Mar 1867
End date: Dec 1875
Sorry, that search found 8401 matches and the maximum number that can be displayed is 3000.

That really is quite eye-opening.

Several dozen of them were both surname unknown and given name unknown. So the rest must have been surname unknown with a known given name!

1875 - 537 deaths Unknown Male, 234 for babies under a year.

heh heh, coming at it two different ways. ;)

"1875 - 537 deaths Unknown Male, 234 for babies under a year"

Sadly, those would have been infants abandoned at birth, in pretty much all cases.

Birth control was one of the greatest inventions in human history.

Gwyn just made me think of something. I always called my real aunties and uncles "Aunty" or "Uncle" (although two of them queries why I'd written "To Uncle John" etc on my 21st birthday invites saying, "Don't you think you're old enough to drop the "Aunty" and "Uncle" bits now - which I still refuse to do) but also I either knew my neighbours as "Mr. Jones" or "Aunty Ann" etc, depending on how well I knew them.

My mum thought it was more polite than having tiny children calling pensioners by their first names. The people that have moved in since I was about ten, though, I call by their first names.

Island,

Do you mean in the post where I say I would have thought they would have been baptised? Yes, I did mean baptised. Even when I was born (late 1940s) not being baptised was considered dreadful because you couldn't be buried in consecrated ground - thus I was baptised twice - once in the hospital by the midwife) as soon as I was born as the area was being bombed at the time and later in our local parish church.

The latter one surprised me, because I had been told about the first and it hadn't occured to me that I would be baptised again but on a school visit to our parish church someone found my baptism in the records.

Unfortunately, being baptised twice hasn't made me twice as good!

Potty -- I think they simply died before there was a chance to baptise them.

Either within hours of birth, or before the baptism was organized.

Yes, Kathryn, I think you are right. How sad!