My sisters and brother have little interest in our family history. My brother, a doctor, was only curious to know what they died of. Finding that out before 1837, when death certificates were introduced, is chancy, though death notices in local newspapers are occasionally specific.
Mary Susannah Burnley (nee Milner) 1804-1831, Thomas Burnley’s first wife, was always delicate. She had such a persistent cough that her horse would stop of its own accord, whenever a fit seized her, so she could take a medicinal pellet from a little silver box she always carried with her. Tuberculosis, whooping cough or asthma, I wonder? What actually killed her, eight months after the birth of her third child, was typhus – a louse-borne disease more often associated with the poor, or overcrowded living conditions like prisons or schools. Didn’t that kill Helen Burns in Jane Eyre? Alongside Mary Susannah’s death notice in The Leeds Mercury was a heart-breaking entry of a stranger’s two little daughters lost to scarlet fever. We are so fortunate to be spared the ubiquitous grief of our ancestors.
Mary Susannah about 1827
We have all heard of ‘housemaid’s knee’, but perhaps not ‘weaver’s bottom’? Yet another occupational hazard now vanished! My ancestors’ 16 hour day at the loom would have made them susceptible. Obtaining death certificates not being cost free, I am assuming anyone over the age of 70 died of old age. Mortality within my ancestors’ extended families is highly variable – some 18th century ones lived to be nearly 90 years old while others in the 20th century barely made it to middle age. The deaths in one family of seven siblings start at age 43 and end at age 84. But that octogenarian gene shows up regularly, if apparently randomly, across eight generations. So, I fear, do chest infections.
Osteomyelitis, abscesses and pneumonia are today amenable to antibiotics. Bulbar’s Paralysis, a horrible death, and heart failure are not. Each little piece of suffering adds a bit more poignancy to the story.
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