Boring Day
Thunderstorms most of the day which at least scrubbed the air for some pollen relief.
There’s an Invest South of the Cape Verde Islands that might get interesting later this week if it stays South of the dry air pouring off the Sahara.
We aren’t bombing anyone new so far, but the week is young.
I noticed some things when I was looking through the records while doing my searches into family history. Men tended to marry later. A family had a half dozen births on average with 5 survivors. There were significant gaps between births, so the final birth, the one that usually died, was when the mother was nearly 40. The time between the marriage and the birth of the first child was between 7 and 10 months. People starting working at about 12 years old until well into the 20th century.
This was from 1850 to 1950. This wasn’t just my family as I tracked a lot of people who turned out not to be members of my family. The people in immigration tended to spell names phonetically, not copied from the documents of the people entering the country, and all the records I was looking at were handwritten in script. [I’m still trying to figure out how Henry F. became Henrietta on a Census form.]
2 comments
Don’t forget that miscarriages are common and the gaps between children could reflect either a miscarriage or a stillborn. Often the poor woman was continually pregnant and either gave birth, lost the baby, or died herself (sometimes all three). My grandmother was born to the third wife of a missionary who had a rack of children. The old goat….
Thank god for birth control pills and modern medicine.
Essentially the 1 in 6 were near stillborn as they didn’t live a month. Miscarriages are still common. My maternal grandfather was one of 18, no twins, and the same two parents over essentially the same 20 year interval. After the last child was born, my great grandparents started living apart in different children’s houses. I met my great grandmother when I was a child while she was staying at my grandparents’ house. She didn’t like small children much, which is understandable.