Puzzling Mortality Statistics

[tony vines]

It is common to read about the short lives of our ancestors but every time I do so I find it hard to reconcile the statistics with what I know about my ancestors. For example in an article in the Sunday Telegraph today comparing attitudes to deaths under the so-called Spanish 'Flu (1918) with deaths in the UK from Covid 19 the following appears "One in 10 children was born dead; of those born alive, one in five would not reach the age of nine. The average lifespan of a man was 48 and of a woman 50".

My researched family tree is not particularly large by comparison with many I've seen but it still numbers around 1,500 distinct people. They come together by marriage from many different families and almost without exception from typically poor circumstances - mainly, before the 20th century in agricultural labouring. But when I look at cross-sections of those lines I find that most adults lived far longer than the statistics above (although I cannot estimate how many children died stillborn and achieved no official recognition on baptism or burial records).

For example I have my paternal line back to around the 1760s and I can only find two men who failed to live into their 60s or longer. One had a chronic heart problem, probably completely unrelated to background and the other was killed by the other frequently forgotten epidemic of the 1920s known as "encephalitis lethargica". The women mostly outlived the men as is the case today but again they mainly lasted longer than the 50 year limit cited above.

So where do all those extra deaths come from that drag down the average mortality statistics? Were the towns and cities so much more lethal than the impoverished countryside? And if the mortality tables take the many deaths of children and add them to the deaths of adults to obtain a low average, surely the average lifespan figures are pretty meaningless. It doesn't for example tell us much if you add 5 deaths of children aged say 5 to 5 deaths of adults aged say 70 and arrive at an average lifespan of 37.5 years. It would be more helpful to say for example that the average age at death of a 15 year old in the 1800s was 65 - or whatever the number might be rather than trotting out meaningless so-called mortality figures based on the entire population, when it is acknowledged that infantile deaths were high.

Tony

[Megan Roberts]

From my perspective I would throw in a couple of points.

We don't how many children didn't get beyond childhood. I was staggered to see in the 1911 census that my gt gt grandmother had had 11 children. I knew of 5. Trying to identify the missing 6 is very difficult when you have a combination of names like Roberts and Griffith.
A quick look at the 19th death indices show a phenomenal number of child deaths; remember at that stage ages appear in the index rather than dates of birth.

All these children dying contribute significantly to dragging down the average age calculations.

A couple of other points I would make is that many women died in childbirth, and by definition they would be below the average age. Secondly another cause of death particularly for the young would be if they worked in the wrong industry, e.g. mining. Finally those who had moved as say part of the industrial revolution could find themselves living in what quickly became the slums living in unimaginable squalor and disease.

Turning to your point about the validity of statistics I would simply say that providing all the assumptions are set out and the methodology used to calculate the average is the same for each time period they have a use as you are comparing like with like. What it can't take account of are social and economic differences.

[Lesley Robertson]

I agree. Such comparisons don’t mean much, even if they carefully define the data they use.

Just looking at my 1 place study of an agricultural village with a community ranging from wealthy tenant farmers to the very poor, I would want to split it into some sort of time blocks depending on what I was studying.
For example (ignoring genetics), up until late in the 19th century, annual deaths of women aged between mid teens and 50ish were always higher than those of men, despite the fact that the men were working with heavy machinery and animals. Once they realized that hygiene was important in childbed,this changed. Just something as simple as the midwives washing their hands before moving to a new patient made a major difference. Women started outliving men, something they’d previously only done if they’d avoided or survived childbirth. Only looking at adult women mixes the two groups and returns a different number.

Nutrition, infections, lack of immunization, foul air, industrial hazards, factoring any of them in to a comparison must introduce additional errors.

You know what they say about statistics!

(Megan obviously types faster than me).

I’ll add another factor. Among young children, a regular cause of death was burns because they played too near open fires. This was not limited to the poor - presumably richer children were wearing more fabric as gathers and frills... There’s not a lot of data about that, just the time period of one Minister who noted such things.

[Pam Downes]

Tony, with regard to what Lesley said about children working in mines enter "Children's employment commission - second report 1842 (evidence of children)" into a search engine.
There is this link re mining.
https://museum.wales/childrenofthere...t/1842-report/

Other links re the report in general are available.

Another major source of accidents were the cotton mills where children had to run and pick up stuff from the floor as the machines worked their way backwards and forwards. Safety guards to prevent limbs, hair, etc getting caught in the machinery were unheard of.


The Internet Archive has this report about women, young persons, and children working in agriculture in 1868.
https://archive.org/details/cu31924002402133

Pam

[tony vines]

Thanks all for your detailed replies but I guess that my main point remains that if you use statistics like mortality tables out of context you can give a highly misleading impression. From today's Telegraph article (which is otherwise a very interesting article by a respected journalist) you might conclude that any man living beyond 48 in the 19th century (or indeed the early 20th century which is when he was writing about) was remarkable. My oldest known male paternal ancestor, born around 1766, lived to be 80 and his wife was 84. And as I said initially they were not particularly unusual in my wider family.

To take the point about mining, it would be more relevant if writers told us that the average age at death of coal face miners was 40 (or whatever the actual number was) and the dates when this was the case. Likewise it would be reasonable to sweep agricultural communities into a rather large basket and maybe compare them to the workers who moved from farming into the cities. It would make the very important point that industrialisation of farming led to fewer jobs on the land but after ag. labs went to work in the slums of Victorian England their life expectancies plumetted.

I'm generalising for the purposes of my argument but that's my point really. If you use nation-wide mortality tables they don't really tell you much at the individual or community level and are therefore very misleading.

[Ed McKie]

Tony,
Did your respected journalist give the source of his statistics? Haven't read the article so don't the premise or point that he was making and using these figures to support it.

[tony vines]

Hi Ed

The journalist didn't give the source of his statement but as a piece of journalism rather than an academic paper I wouldn't expect sources or footnotes. I agree that in context it supports his contention that when the Spanish 'Flu killed so many people across the world people were more accustomed to death. The pandemic first struck at the end of the First World War and also, as others have pointed about above, child and female mortality was much higher than today. However as a nitpicker I would argue that he only needed to point that out and while using the average can be excused as journalistic licence, if read casually and without wider knowledge it nevertheless might suggest that most men were dead by the age of 48 and women by 50.

Perhaps I shouldn't read too much into such articles but if nothing else I was delighted to follow up the more learned papers referred to above on mining and agricultural communities. The paper on child labour in coal mines is horrific and in the paper on agricultural communities I was amused to find that an overseer in the Northamptonshire hamlet that several of my paternal line ag.labs came from opined that they were not very good workers. He didn't mention my 3 x great uncle by name though!

Tony