Comments on: A family history

By: rootlesscosmo

rootlesscosmo — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 05:38:56 +0000

On parental attachment to newborns: I never bought the argument that a high rate of infant mortality was a reason for delayed naming.

@HistoryMaven:

It seems to have been among the poor Brazilians described in Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ Death Without Weeping.

http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780520075375-2

By: Historiann

Historiann — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:05:10 +0000

Fretful Porpentine wrote, [W]hy is everyone assuming that Leonard and Amanda had only three children? The twelve-year gap suggests to me that there were probably several children in between who survived.”

Because it’s more poignant to tell the story that way!

Seriously–we don’t know, of course. But there are no other Sanford children buried near the family stone, as seems to be the case with many families in this rural cemetery. (Many central family stones are surrounded by the graves of children, boys and girls, who were buried with their natal families rather than their husbands & wives.) There are some markers and graves that were filled over the course of two or even three generations. But, I wouldn’t assume that Amanda had several surviving children–in fact, the fact that two children died in infancy or in childbirth may indicate a history of miscarriages and/or birth defects, which might also explain the 12-year gap between James and Baby.

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 18:29:33 +0000

The “Their” Sons part is rhetorically interesting, regarding the “authorship” of the stone. There could have been girls who outlived their brothers but then scattered before 1929, when neighbors or friends laid the stone. If James was the eldest child, as seems plausible from the mother’s birthdate, any surviving siblings would have been no more than in their late 40s when Leonard died. There’s also the question of when the stone was in fact set. I buried one parent with the other standing there looking at hir own name already engraved on the stone, with birth date and room left for another date. I thought that was a fairly weird economy of chiselling. When did that funerary custom begin?

By: Fretful Porpentine

Fretful Porpentine — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:44:47 +0000

I agree that it’s a sad image, but why is everyone assuming that Leonard and Amanda had only three children? The twelve-year gap suggests to me that there were probably several children in between who survived.

By: HistoryMaven

HistoryMaven — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 14:15:11 +0000

On parental attachment to newborns: I never bought the argument that a high rate of infant mortality was a reason for delayed naming. One could easily assume the opposite, especially for those Christians who believed in infant baptism. Some denominations mandated public, minister-administered baptism, rather than private. So the delay in naming may have been tied to officiating schedules, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (Martha Ballard certainly delivered many, many healthy babies, but the minister could take his time.) The newborn child could have been addressed by the chosen name, informally (unrecorded officially), or could have been affectionately called “the baby” or “Baby.” But here we’ve a more modern record (and the stone is a twentieth-century design, so questions of authorship also pertain–Leonard? an extended family member?), and the possible stories about “Baby” within this family and as historical evidence are, as Historiann writes, poignant.

I always felt that mothers (and women in general) were demeaned when social historians made arguments such as large families were created for labor in agricultural communities and that parental love was extensive and distance due to family size and infant mortality rates. Social historians got illiteracy rates for women so totally wrong when wills were analyzed for signatures; E. Jennifer Monaghan’s pathbreaking work overrode those studies. We need to know more about processes and assumptions behind the formalities; accounting rather than just counting.

By: Historiann

Historiann — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 13:42:48 +0000

Thanks, all–about “Baby”: I just assume that Amanda and the child died in childbirth in 1894, and so baby remained “Baby,” whereas Leroy died after birth but before age 1. (Either that, or Amanda named Leroy but perhaps was too ill or dead already, and so Baby didn’t get a name.)

In a way, I think it’s more poignant that baby is Baby. Even in death, a motherless child isn’t looked after the way a surviving mother would have looked after him.

I don’t know if it’s sadder to have been Amanda, who died so young after such vexed efforts to become a mother, or if it was worse to have been Leonard, who lived to bury not just his wife but all of his children.

By: Susan

Susan — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 05:18:52 +0000

I love the stories in graveyards, which often leave me sad, wondering about lives, etc. A great start for a historian!

By: Ex-Pat

Ex-Pat — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 04:08:19 +0000

In the early sixties, in a children’s hospital I “baptised” one ,possibly two newborns who were in critical condition. As nurses we were advised to do what we could. It was a very Catholic community.I never met the parents but if it became necessary the “ceremony” was documented in the nurses’ notes.I gave the child no name, just a few words from the Anglican book of prayer.

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 03:09:12 +0000

I thought of the same thing as Shane Landrum, except that I was given pause by the fact that “Leroy” seems to have lasted less than a year, but was in fact named. The past is pretty unyielding of some of its secrets. My mother once lost a child in stillbirth, basically a botched ob-gyn episode, which was of course devastating to her. In the very early trauma and chaos, the maternity nurse, probably a nun, took over and arranged a very quick baptism-like ceremony (I don’t know the theology of this). She took the liberty of naming the child after her own late brother; or rather, a female analogue of her brother’s name. As far as I know, that’s the way it went into the bureaucratic record book, for future historians or genealogists to puzzle over, or not.

By: Shane Landrum

Shane Landrum — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:39:04 +0000

HistoryMaven said:

I’m surprised to see “Baby” rather than a name. What story is there waiting to be told?

The age at which children get their names has varied over time in North America. In the 17th century among Anglo-Americans, children often didn’t get distinct names until several weeks or months after birth; most historians I’ve read trace this to high rates of infant mortality and families not wanting to attach themselves too deeply to an individual child until s/he’d lived through the (very statistically dangerous) first few months.

Infant mortality rates as we know them— number of children per 1000 live births who die before the age of 1 year— were impossible to calculate accurately in most US jurisdictions until the early 20th century. (Officials had to have an accurate count of births in their jurisdictions to do a modern-style IMR calculation, and compulsory birth registration systems were hard to get right.) That said, it was common in many 19th-century cities for 30 to 50 percent of all deaths in a year to be children under 5, particularly infants. So it doesn’t surprise me at all to see unnamed “Baby” inscriptions on headstones.

Historiann, you’re right— there’s a whole story to be built on terse family histories like this. I do a lot with family Bible records in my dissertation, and one of the things that becomes apparent after you’ve read enough of those is how many of them were probably written by women, recording the deaths of their own family members— particularly children.