A - Z
Many of the days of April I wrote of Ancestors, I did not write much of flowers and trees, and I am not quite done with those ancestors yet.
A for Age.
Did people really die that young in the days of old? Are my great-great ... grandparents exceptional when reaching 70 and more years of age?
If you look at my post Numbers (I have inserted the relevant page here belov) you'll find 6 who died at an age between 74 and 80, and there are 3 more 70 or more. And this is quite an average page from the church register of Ulse parish. It seems we were wrong in presuming this.
Our error - mine too before looking in all those church registers - is equalling the average age with the expected age. Stillborn babies, and those many, many children dying before their five year's birthday, makes for an average age of 45 or something like it. (In 1900 it was 50 according to the statistical bureau of Denmark). But this does emphatically not mean that everybody dropped dead at 50 or below or that people were old and decrepit when they reached 40 years of age (as in Clan of the Cavebear). Let's crunch some numbers.
First that page from the church register once again:
6 highlighted and three more over 70, but outside my "field of interest" No surely everybody does not drop dead at the average age.
Then I wrote down the age of all the dead persons - four whole years in this register. The result looks like this ('' means stillborn).
I did the same for 50 years later; the four years 1845-48, and 50 later once again for 1895 to 1898.
Then I made me a small program and did some maths. The results are as follows:
Ages in Ulse Parish:
At birth in 1795-98 a newborn in Ulse could only expect to live for an average of 25 years, But if the infant survived those first five years, the life expectancy rose to 57,2 years, and upon reaching 15 years of age, the young person could look forward to celebrating his or her 71st birthday.
NB: These numbers should be taken with a heaped spoonful of salt, as they are a very small sample from a very small parish. But still, as I read on an official site that the live expectancy for a newborn Dane in 1900 was 50 years, which fits my Ulse number for 1895-1898, it might not be that far off the mark.
A for Age.
Imagine your family magically transported back to Ulse in 1795. How many of you, your spouses and children would be alive? Remember no antibiotics, no appendectomies, no caesarians, no help if the merl pit fell on you or the horse tossed you, or you were scalded by water or fire (a painful and slow way to die). An infected wound or pneumonia ... in short anything where you were taken to the ER, had an intervention or antibiotics would probably have killed you.
I begin:
Instead of being a 61 years old mother of 1 girl, 5 boys and grandmother of 2, I would not have been typing these lines. My husband would have been a widower (probably re-married), and neither kids, nor grandkids would have existed.
Four years more than the average would have been allotted me - I would actually have been one of the atypical ones dying after 16 and before 71.
I doubt I would have made it out of my teens. I had pneumonia quite often in my youth. And I doubt that my mother would have survived to give birth to me (her youngest child) in any event.
SvarSletOnly the toughest survived back then.
Sletand this average/expected age stuff has been lurking since I read "The Clan of the Cavebear" as a young one, and wondered why they called persons of only 36 or so Wise Old Ones.
What would have killed me: A bee sting.
Very interesting analysis, and a sobering question at the end. I might not be here for any number of things that went wrong, including tonsillitis that required antibiotics and one child whose birth required forceps. My older child might not be here because of the forceps delivery and the fact I had gestational diabetes requiring insulin. And my mother had either scarlet fever or meningitis when she was three or four, and was expected to die (and her coffin was built) but she recovered, had to learn to walk and talk again, and is still going at 93. Had she died, neither my brother nor I, nor our children, nor their children, would exist. And that's just going back one generation.
SvarSletLife was much more precarious back then, and strangely human beings were not valued as much - at least some of them - or maybe this is a strange consequense ... you knew (more intimately than we do) that death was certain, and part and parcel of being born ... I am rambling ... It is a mystery to me.
Slet