RootsChat.Com
General => The Common Room => The Lighter Side => Topic started by: brushbroomstick on Thursday 22 November 18 16:02 GMT (UK)
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I am curious to know why only the 3 boys of my gr grandfathers 10 children survived. All the girld died under 2 years of age.
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Have you obtained any of the daughters' death certificates to identify their causes of death? It may just be a matter of chance in each case that the girls died.
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No particular reason, it could just as easily have been the girls that survived or a combination of both.
I would think.
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How many girls? Did all 10 children have same mother?
When and where?
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They all had the same mother and were born between 1866 and 1888 in Spennymoor area of County Durham. I have not obtained any of their death certificates as this would be too costly.
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Only the death certificates can tell you the actual cause of death but perhaps if you have the years of the girls' respective deaths you can do an internet search to see if there were any epidemics in the area in those years.
For total number of children do you have their baptisms or birth certificates or are you going on the data from the 1911 census 'number of children born alive to present marriage & number still alive'?
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No Birth certs. only info from Bishops Transcripts, Civil Registration , some baptism indexes Bmd indexes the 1911 census.
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How many girls? Did all 10 children have same mother?
When and where?
Did all 10 children have same father?
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All 7 girls had the same mother and father.
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There may just be no rhyme or reason about it. Each child could have died from any number of causes - birth defects (e.g. heart), prematurity, malnutrition, infectious disease (whether epidemic or not), non-infectious disease, accidents such as suffocation in bed, poisoning from teething potions, etc etc.
Some families will have suffered repeated infant deaths due to specific causes such as mitochondrial disease (as we would now understand it), rhesus disease (as we would now understand it), congenital syphilis or a tendency in the mother towards premature delivery, but without knowing any of the circumstances in your family any guess will just be a stab in the dark. There is no reason to think any of these would favour the survival of male infants rather than female.
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I see you do not list parish records amongst your sources, sometimes cause of death was noted on them.
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I see you do not list parish records amongst your sources, sometimes cause of death was noted on them.
I've also seen cause of death on some cemetery burial registers.
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I see you do not list parish records amongst your sources, sometimes cause of death was noted on them.
You beat me to it
xin
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My grandfather born 1863 was the only one of the six boys born to his parents to survive infancy. Some of them were stillborn, most a few days old at death. Four girls, however, all survived to a ripe old age. Looking at his mother's family I found that her (gt-grandmother's) sister had similar problems. She had three sets of twins from whom only one girl survived. In the following generation only girls were born to both my grandmother and her sister. It looks as though the female children of this family were stronger. My grandfather died aged 59, but his 4 sisters all lived to their 80s.
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One very old lady that I talked with many years ago was reminiscing about her wider family, who were poor upland farmers, and mentioned in a very matter of fact way that her father and his brothers had had a hard life growing up, and their sisters had not survived to adulthood because if food was short, the men and boys got what there was, as they had to work!
Sounded brutal to us, today, doesn't it. but I suspect in many poor countries today it may be the same. I think she was speaking of people growing up in the second half of the 19th Century.
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As others have mentioned, there may not be any pattern to female deaths in the family but I do know a couple who had a daughter (died at birth) then three healthy boys. I don't know the medical details but apparently there was a genetic reason why the daughter (and any other daughters) would not survive long after birth. In my own family there is a (large) family where all the boys have PKU (Phenylketonuria) but none of the girls have inherited the disease themselves. However, without causes of death anything is mere speculation.
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My grandmother born 1898 the 7th of 8 children told of her father having meat with his dinner, the rest of the family had vegetables and gravy. He had a heavy job in a foundry and needed the protein.
After meals they would say 'Thank you Lord for what I've had. If there had been a bit more I would have been glad.
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My mother-in-law told me that during the wartime and post-war rationing period near enough all the meat ration was given to her husband, a plumber and builder, so in a reserved occupation, and the rest of the family just had vegetables from the allotment and gravy. To this day my husband doesn't like meat.
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My mother-in-law told me that during the wartime and post-war rationing period near enough all the meat ration was given to her husband, a plumber and builder, so in a reserved occupation, and the rest of the family just had vegetables from the allotment and gravy. To this day my husband doesn't like meat.
Men doing what was classified as heavy work had increased rations in WW2.
There was also food rationing during, and for a while after WW1.
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This was WW2, should have clarified. Not sure if father-in-law had the increased rations you mention.
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If he's listed in the 1939 Register, his occupation should have 'Heavy work' written after it. That wording would entitle him to extra rations.
Carol
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Generally speaking baby girls tend to do better at surviving than baby boys (they say it's one of the reasons why slightly more baby boys are born statistically than girls.
There may be a reason why a single issue affected only girls than boys (though I have to say all the genetic issues I can think of off the top of my head are the other way round) - where in the family did the boys come in relation to the girls? That may be a clue and the genders just being a coincidence
While food would often be given to the 'men' of the family first, followed by the wage earning females etc I'm not so sure that would affect the under 2s (though some families may have preferred one gender over the other)