I saw the play Bach and Sons recently, which was rather good but referred to the unfortunate fate of Johann Sebastian’s twenty (!) children, ten of whom died before the age of five. Another son, Johann Gottfried Bernhard, died at age 24 while his father was still alive.
Bach also lost his first wife (and mother to the first six children) Maria Barbara when she was 35.
i remember reading years ago that until the late 1800s a lot of parents and ethnic groups and even municipalities wouldn’t even give or register their children legal names until they reached school age because of the death rate of children
Now if that was actually true or not I never checked up on
Even later–my grandmother (born in 1927) told me once that when she was young, you didn’t really go to the hospital to get better. It was where you went to die.
The subject came up when I questioned why a family friend–about my grandparents’ age–didn’t go to the hospital for several hours after a suspected heart attack.
Both my mother (in the late '50’s) and my sister (in the early '80’s - she herself was a twin) lost sets of twins born prematurely. I don’t know about my deceased siblings, but I’m pretty sure my sister’s twins would’ve made it if they’d been born just a decade later.
StG
My father had two older siblings - both born some time between 1915 and 1928 though I think both were before 1920 - whom he never met.
Since the OP mentioned children of early presidents, I don’t know if it’s relevant to point out that the water supply in Washington used to be tainted. Many of those kids likely died before their father made it to the presidency, but it was not a healthy place to be, and may be responsible for several early presidential deaths.
Kennedy lost two babies. I went to Wikipedia to check on a book I read that said JFK had four children and I thought he only had three. Turns out his first child with Jackie was a daughter named Arabella. She died on the day she was born.
After trying for a boy and ending up with four girls, my grandparents called it quits in the late '20s. My grandmother got the latest treatment - a hysterectomy using radium. It took 40 years to kill her, but it did.
Anecdotally, a lot of kids died in accidents back when, too.
I did some extensive research once in newspapers from 1903. Seemed that every front page had a headline along the lines of “Boy Crushed by Trolley,” “Children Drown in Lake,” or “Accident with Horse Kills Girl, 8.”
I don’t know that accidents like these have diminished since then, but it feels that way.
Have they? 90% of autistic children that die after wandering off between the ages of 1 and 14 drown. I see tons of sad articles about drowned little boys.
I read an interesting article that presented a surprising historical statistic; the death rate due to accidents has remained pretty consistent over the last six hundred years.
Which makes no sense. Conditions between the fifteenth century and the twenty-first century are so vastly different that you would expect a vast change. The massive changes in health care would presumably have driven the accidental death rate far down. And at the same time, the situations which cause accidental deaths have substantially changed. Six hundred years ago, most people used to work on farms around animals. Nowadays most people like in cities and are exposed to dangers like automobiles and electricity. But despite this, the accidental death rate has remained constant.
The authors observed this without explaining it. The only theory they offered was that there is an invisible social element involved. When society feels that too many people are dying, they tighten up on safety procedures. When the accidental death rate seems low, people engage in riskier behavior. So it appears there is a natural balance. It’s like how when the government mandated seatbelts and motorcycle helmets, people felt safer and responded by driving faster.
Very similar with my paternal grandmother. She told me when I was quite young (like 5ish) that she was the youngest of 17 kids. My father insisted she was pulling my leg, he had 7 aunts and uncles, she was the youngest of 9.
About 15 years after she died, I was doing my family tree on Ancestry. Put her in, added her parents, and up comes 17 kids. The “missing” 8 all died at less than a year old, all before 1920, and mixed in between the surviving siblings. There was paperwork on Ancestry showing each one’s death. Sure enough, she was legitimately the youngest of 17.
Not far from me is a tree with a 1862 gravestone at its foot. We made a 2 minute video about the infants buried there, narrated by George Evenson.
My paternal grandfather (b. 1899) was the youngest of six. I don’t think there were any child deaths, but I may have to poke around a bit and verify it.
On the other hand, my father-in-law is named Michael, and it was hard to pull up information on him because he had an older brother who died before his first birthday who was also named Michael (both named after their father). Apparently he had occasional trouble getting various documents (birth certificates in particular) because of the two Michael’s.
Someone mentioned Bach and his 10 dead kids up thread. I don’t know who he was trying to name a child after but he named 3 of his daughters Christiana and a son Christian in the attempt.
On the other hand, he also named 5 sons Johann, and 3 of them lived (plus a daughter Johanna), so…
There was a grand aunt who dressed her son in dresses and frill up u til he went to school. It turns out there had been a baby girl who didn’t make it.
I’m from polygamous roots and many of my ancestors had lots of children who didn’t survive. One great great grandfather had 22 children (from two of his three wives) and almost half died as children.
I remember looking at 1912 US mortality statistics by age and comparing them to 70 years later. From what I could see, in 1912 about 5% of people never made to their first birthday and around 20% overall never made it past age 10. Looking at stats for the 1980s, mortality rates for ages birth to around 45 or 50 were all in the 0.0n% range. So, if the accidental death rate is consistent, it must be a really small number.
Extending this out to the British royal family, I had once read that Queen Elizabeth was delivered by cesarean section, and for that to have happened in the 1920s, something had to go DRASTICALLY wrong. I read more recently that Elizabeth was breech, and the Queen Mother had been in labor for 30 hours and pushing for 10, and at that point, they decided to transport her and deliver her still-living baby that way.
My oldest uncle was born at home, and I don’t know the details, but his birth was very difficult and had they been in a hospital, or even able to transport Grandma, his birth would also have been by c-section. He’s 90 years old now and long-retired from a very successful career. The doctor recommended that future children be born in a hospital, so my other uncle and mother were - and my mother said that both times, the hospital had to call him from a party at the local country club to come to the hospital and do what needed to be done. Those births were uncomplicated.
Abraham Lincoln was in the early stages of variola minor, the less severe form of smallpox, when he gave the Gettysburg Address. I was surprised that he apparently neither had the disease, nor had been vaccinated, by that age.
Once during a long trip, I stopped at a little country cemetery in Montana to stretch my legs. (I find cemeteries interesting and peaceful places.) I was amazed at how many children’s graves there were, all dating to a summer in the early 1930s. I suspect some illness swept through the town. I’m sure the conditions during the Depression didn’t help matters.
My mother lost a baby brother and a baby sister in the nineteen-teens. My paternal grandmother lost two siblings.
In doing genealogical research, I’ve found many families that named subsequent children after a child who’d died. I don’t know if it was a way to honor the deceased child, a means of honoring the family member the dead child was named after, or merely a way to comfort oneself with the thought , “Here we have little Timmy again.”
I’ve mentioned here before that I grew up with a boy who was given the same name as an older brother who’d died awhile back. I guess the parents wanted to carry the name forward. How would the parents refer to the late child when talking to each other? Johnny #1? The first Johnny?