How sad can it be? Six children, all stillborn.

Question

Pieter den Boef and Elsje Slings married February 15, 1852. Elsje passed away June 1863. Pieter and Elsje had 3 daughters and 3 sons. All of them stillborn. How sad can it be?

Comments

Yes sometimes if you see what some people had to go trough during their lives it's really very very sad ...

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Poor woman!

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How terrible for the pour parents, I can't even imagine what they was going through. Really sad

Answer 1

That's terrible. I found my great grandfather on the 1911 census and it said 11 years married, 5 children born, 2 children still living, 3 dead. I was shocked that in the 20th century this was still happening. His brother had seven children and all but two died by the age of 21. The two girls who survived lived to 80 and 97. One of my great grandad's surviving two sons (my grandad) died in his 40's of a heart related condition and of his children, one had a lifelong heart condition, one (my dad) had a lifelong progressive disabling autoimmune condition (which has passed on to me), and one had early breast cancer and died of secondary cancer. I had two babies that had to be delivered early due to my renal disease so if i'd had them a couple of centuries ago, probably none of us would have survived. One of them has autism. I do wonder if all of this is down to poor genetics, maybe a result of people marrying their cousins way back in the 1700's.

Answer 2

Sad but not entirely uncommon... Poor healthcare, poor nutrition,  poor hygiene, and too many children (available data shows that one of the largest declines in infant mortality came *after* families started having less children).

Comments

add to that poor housing with no central heating and no appliances, long/hard working, no vaccinations, no "health and safety" practices and less opportunity for knowledge/education. I was just surprised that after municipal sanitation and piped water came in, people still lost so many kids.

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I was more surprised that my g grandmother, Elizabeth  had 15 children  and  12 were still living at the 1911 census. For most of the time they were living a tiny, terraced cottage. By contrast, her sister-in-law, Emma  who lived next door, had 18 children but only 8 were still alive in 1911 and one of those died a couple of years later.

(don't think that this was a difference in genes, Emma's husband seems to have spent a lot of time getting drunk, fighting and ending up being fined in the magistrates court. Poor Emma would have been left to cope with the little money that he made being 'squandered' so perhaps she did a brilliant job in managing to have that many survive)