[list-cumbria] Cumberland Pacquet - 65

[ianwilliamson161 at gmail.com]

> Surprising that there were so many more burials than baptisms. I thought the population of the country was increasing rather than declining?

 

The population of the country was growing, yes. Nationally at I think about 1-2% per year – certain towns considerably faster. But that wasn’t because towns had a lot more births than deaths. 

-          Towns tended to have worse sanitation, more crowding and higher death rates – before the spread of municipal sanitation in the late 1800s they were population sinks where mortality exceeded births and they relied on migration from the country/overseas for their growth.

-          Towns tended to attract adult migrants moving for work, including young adults who might die before they had children, single people who worked in town for a spell before (if they survived) returning to the country to raise families (I’ve seen this with Whitehaven and rural Cumberland specifically, also Liverpool and rural Cumberland), and sometimes families whose children or some of them had already been born. I guess that’s another way of saying towns were a place where people born in the country went to die.

-          Anecdotally, I see a pattern of some young married women going back to their home parish, presumably to stay with their own mother , for their first birth or maybe two – this will mean that even for ‘urban’ families, some births (and associated baptisms) took place in the country. 

-          The percentage of the population not receiving baptism was higher than the percentage not receiving a recorded burial. Perhaps especially in towns? So the urban imbalance of deaths over births will have been exaggerated by the records omitting more births than deaths. This reduced I think in 1837 with civil registration and especially from 1875 when the requirement was on the parents to notify the birth to the registrar.

 

Happy hunting, Ian.

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