[list-cumbria] Cumberland Pacquet - 65 - Births and Deaths
petra.mitchinson at doctors.org.uk
petra.mitchinson at doctors.org.uk
Thu Feb 6 01:14:53 UTC 2025
Yes, it’s interesting.
I would just say, the deaths were not mainly amongst the older adults. I think the majority who died were children. They aren’t reported in the newspaper BMDs at that time, but child mortality was very high. And adults of all ages died of infectious diseases, accidents etc. The death notices in the newspapers are biased to some degree in that they are more likely to report deaths of old people, and of the better off part of the population. The better off people had a better chance of living longer.
As regards Carlisle, the baptisms and burials listed at the beginning of the year for the previous year were for the parishes of St. Mary and St. Cuthbert’s, which included many of the suburbs and further out.
This is the statistics reported in the Carlisle Journal of 03 Jan 1801 for the year 1800 (sorry, the formatting went haywire when copying from my Word document):
Births, Marriages, and Deaths, in the City of
Carlisle, for the year 1800.
At St. Mary's. At St. Cuthbert's. Total.
Christenings 139 ——— Christenings 90 ——— 168*
Marriages - 62 ——— Marriages 20 ——— 82
Burials - - 182 ——— Burials - - 13 ——— 195
* Exclusive of those at Dissenting chapels, which seldom amount to more than 20 annually.
That a comparison may be made of the State of Population, we subjoin the Report of the year preceding:—
Christenings - - - - - - - 256
Marriages - - - - - - - - 67
Burials - - - - - - - - - - 169
Now, that shows that I was wrong at least as far as the year 1800 is concerned – there were more deaths than births. However, it seems in 1799 there were significantly more christenings than burials.
The numbers for 1801, reported in the Carlisle Journal of 02 Jan 1802, are as follows:
>From the Registers of the parishes of St. [M]ary and St. Cuthbert, Carlisle, the num[ber] of Christenings, Marriages, and Burials, [fro]m December 31st, 1800, to January 1st, [180]2, appears to be as follows:
ST. MARY'S—Christenings, - 168
Marriages, - - 56
Burials, - - - 134
ST. CUTHBERT'S—Christenings, - 110
Marriages, - - 30
Burials, - - - 94
Again, a surplus of births, although not quite as marked as in 1799.
Then on 15 Jan 1803, the numbers for 1802 and 1801 are reported, and the numbers for 1801 are in many respects quite different from the ones reported a year previously! This was obviously not an exact science....
The number of Chistenings [sic], Marriages, and Burials, which took place in this city, in the year 1802, was as follows:—
At St. Mary's. At St. Cuthbert's. Total.
Christenings 162 | Christenings 127 | 289
Marriages 93 | Marriages 45 | 138
Burials 142 | Burials 101 | 243
That a comparison may be made of the State of Population, we subjoin the Report of the year preceding:—
At St. Mary's. At St. Cuthbert's. Total.
Christenings 153 | Christenings 93 | 246
Marriages 56 | Marriages 20 | 76
Burials 134 | Burials 136 | 270
The numbers for 1803 reported on 14 Jan 1804 – this time a clear surplus of Christenings:
The following is the number of Marriages, Christenings, and Burials, which took place in this city from January 1, 1803, to December 31, inclusive; viz.
ST. MARY'S. | ST. CUTHBERT'S.
Marriages - - - 87 | Marriages - - - 46
Christenings - - 202 | Christenings - - 153
Burials - - - 138 | Burials - - - 97
I suppose it all depends on whether you had an epidemic of something or other, particularly affecting children – measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever, all had peak years and trough years.
Interesting stuff!
Petra
From: list-cumbria <list-cumbria-bounces at list.cumbriafhs.com> On Behalf Of ianwilliamson161--- via list-cumbria
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Subject: Re: [list-cumbria] Cumberland Pacquet - 65
That is interesting. I wonder if they had good sanitation? A lack of employment or of housing meaning there wasn’t much new adult immigration? A cemetery that’s missing from the records somehow?
(A quick search suggests it wasn’t a lack of migration https://www.cumbriacountyhistory.org.uk/township/carlisle though possibly the baptism and burial numbers for Carlisle proper don’t cover new suburbs where most of the migrants lived???)
Or maybe the population growth was such that in most towns the births (to large cohorts of young adults) outnumbered the deaths (mainly among the smaller cohorts of older adults) despite the death rates being high, and it was Whitehaven where something else was going on.
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Subject: Re: [list-cumbria] Cumberland Pacquet - 65
Thanks for the possible explanations, Ian. It is just that the Carlisle numbers in the early 1800s always showed a marked surplus of baptisms over burials. And that was a town too!
Petra
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Subject: RE: [list-cumbria] Cumberland Pacquet - 65
> 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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