Five, and Genealogy

[flea]

Yes, laundry at 6am night five. Why we are doing this at age 4 and 3 months after more than a year of dry beds, I dunno.

I've been doing a big genealogy project in off times for a little while now, and it is surprisingly fun - the thrill of discovery! My father inherited some 6 or 7 boxes from his father, who kept up a long genealogical correspondence with a distant cousin (a librarian, natch) who lived in Washington PA, the town his family came from. My father estimated this week that he'd sorted through about 15% of the first box (whence came all the images in my flickr stream.) I'm doing a little on the maternal side, too - I know my mother has tons of information but unlike my father she is not retired and does not own a scanner.

It's fascinating to me to look at my family history in the context of American history and social change. My paternal history is all about westward expansion in Pennsylvania, from the Scots-Irish settled near Allentown in 1750 who dealt with "Indian troubles" to the early settlers in Washington, PA (which is south of Pittsburg and was on the frontier in 1790). Then it's about industrialization, and education as the way to become part of the propertied class, employing immigrants as servants. And how early immigrants' children can make good - the 11th child of an immigrant who settled on the frontier ends as a federal district court judge in industrialized Victorian Pittsburgh.

I am fascinated by family sizes and how they change in different regions and times (if you were having kids in Western PA at the turn of the 19th century, you had 12 kids; in New England generally far fewer, and the the end of the century 5 was a lot everywhere.)

I come from a lot of people who were in the US before the Revolution. Except for a pair of ancestors who emigrated from Germany in 1850, nearly all of my lines end up with a Revolutionary War soldier - I could be in the DAR about 20 times over. (Even my Nova Scotian great grandmother was from people who were in MA before they went to Canada, being loyalists).

Education is huge, and can lead to riches if you become a lawyer, and not if you become a minister. I have an ancestor who graduated from Princeton in 1745, and in the direct line I am descended from, every single ancestor of mine went to college. And it's largely a female line! His son went to Dartmouth, then a daughter to Mount Holyoke (ca. 1840!), her daughter attended Wellesley, hers was Wellesley 1907, my grandmother Radcliffe 1933, and my aunt attended Radcliffe, too. But those folks were teachers and ministers, and never had much money. My achievements, such as they are, are deeply reliant on the level of education and social class of my ancestors. History matters, even on an individual basis.

I'll post the link to the web site I've set up in a locked post in a second - locked because the site mentions my actual name which I try to keep separate from this identity. If you've not got access to my locked posts and are interested in my dead ancestors (such a possibility seems vanishingly small, but there you have it), send me an email.

Comments

[meara]

That's all pretty neat! My ancestors are less intriguing, I think.

[veejane]

The childbearing thing is largely explainable by the basic problem of labor in rural areas, especially frontier areas: it's really really hard to run a family farm unless your family includes at least 6-8 able-bodied young people. If you can't afford to hire 'em (or I guess buy them, in the case of slavery), you got to make your own.

Jack Larkin did a series of books on American everyday life, and the 1790-1840 volume includes an intriguing chronicle of seasonal childbirth: free children were often conceived in April-June, and conceptions fell off once the heavy labor of summer farming and fall harvest got underway. Whereas slave children were conceived more often on a nutrition schedule: few when the food was poor, in late winter and early spring, and many more when the food was good, in late summer. (p. 66)

He also has this to say about northern marriages in the period:

In communities across the North, married couples had begun having smaller families than in previous generations [...] Women in rural Massachusetts were wedding at over twenty-five, two years later than their mothers had thirty years before, and five years later than their grandmothers.

But local registers that record births and marriages also eloquently reveal that many of these couples were also doing something far more revolutionary once married, they were consciously choosing within marriage to limit the number of their children. Mothers in eighteenth century American usually bore the last of their children in their early forties, ceasing to have children only when it was no longer biologically possible. In Sturbridge and other New England towns after 1800 women were undergoing their final pregnancies increasingly earlier each decade. Among the Quakers of southeastern Pennsylvania, couples were limiting their families by increasing the spacing between births rather than shortening the length of the childbearing years.

That's from pp. 68-9. No word how they avoided pregnancy; though the text speculates a little that's not the sort of thing diarists wrote down. The ensuing pages talk a lot about the relative prices of land and labor, and the relative availability of non-farming jobs, as likely causes for the birth-rate decline.