Swaledale Villages

This is one section of Swaledale Villages, a series of essays based on Swaledale census data from 1841 to 1901. Please click here to go to the main Introduction and contents list.

Births and marriages

Family sizes and birth rate

We have all seen photographs of Victorian families with their many children sitting solemnly on mother's knee, or clustered around, aged apparently 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9 and upwards. There were certainly a lot more children around as a proportion of the total population. I counted how many children had been born in Swaledale between each census.

children aged 10 and under	1841	1851	1861	1871	1881	1891	1901
total number of children	2098	2145	1846	1468	1321	769	547
% of population	31%	31%	30%	27%	28%	24%	21%

For comparison, Birmingham (UK) Council's summary of its city's results from the 2001 census gives one useful fact: 31% is now the proportion of England's population aged under 25, not the proportion aged under 11 (as it had been in 1851).

So I calculated average family size in 19thC Swaledale with some anticipation, and was disappointed to find that it was 5 in 1851, 1861, 1881 and 4 in 1871, 1891 and 1901. I thought it would be much higher, then realised I would have to be more selective and exclude those households which did not have any children at all.

The largest dale population occurred in 1851, when the total number of residents was 6,835. Of these, 1,936 (29%) were under the age of 10. So I extracted all those 1851 Swaledale families with at least one child under the age of 10. In the few households which had grandchildren (and nieces and nephews) mixed in I chose not to try to find their originating parents; I simply excluded the households from the analysis.

Of the total number of households in Swaledale in 1851 (1,417) only 20% did not have young children. In this chart the pale area represent those families with young children. For comparison, the Family Studies Policy Centre report published in 1995 shows the opposite (in the UK) – the dark area would now almost represent households with dependent children.

And of the families with young children, the family size was as follows:

No. of children	No. of families	Mother's age (avg)
11	1	41.0
10	5	40.8
9	8	42.4
8	16	43.4
7	39	39.5
6	63	40.2
5	88	39.3
4	130	36.5
3	152	34.8
2	140	31.4
1	103	28.0

The third column in the table above shows the average age, in 1851, of the mothers of each family size. I expected the 1- and 2-child families to have mothers much younger, in line with the Age at Marriage graph below. The difference is that some women had their first babies in their 30s. Even so, you can see that the mothers of small families had years of child-bearing ahead of them.

Many of these families will, in addition, have had children who died. A 3-year gap or more between regularly-spaced children suggests a death, even when the baby has been born and died between censuses and the only other record is in parish registers. And many mothers continued having babies well into their forties.

Here is that 11-children family in 1851:

Thomas	Elizabeth	Jane	Elizabeth (maid)	Thomas	John	Ralph	Mary Martha	James	Ann	Charles	William	Hannah	George
Head	wife	dau	dau	son	son	son	dau	son	dau	son	son	dau	son
M	M	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-
51	41	16	14	14	13	11	10	8	6	5	4	2	3m

The 1841 census shows that Thomas and Elizabeth had another daughter, Elizabeth, then about five years old, but since she does not appear with them in 1851 I thought she must have died. However, a quick check in the complete Swaledale census list showed her working for the landowning Harland household in 1851 as one of three domestic servants.

So in fact the biggest family in the dale had 12 children, not 11. And all of them must have survived because there is just not a big enough gap in the ages to fit in one more. The family’s 70-acre farm had a lot of work to do. And there was a loose 8-year-old called Matthew living with (aunt?) Margaret in Reeth. A 13th child from the family? But there were two other Nelson families in the dale with young children, so I stopped here. You can get too obsessive.

Elizabeth was 41 when George was born. I could not bear the thought of her having more babies so I tracked her down. In 1861 she was living with her husband Thomas Nelson, a cowman in Gilling, Richmond, with their children James, Ann and George. George was their youngest. Catherine, yet another daughter, who had been with her Blenkiron grandparents since at least 1841, was still with them in 1861 in Marrick. Her existence made a total of thirteen children, and there they all are in the Marrick baptism register.

Footnote: A year or so after this essay was published on our website I went on to look at parish register BMD transcripts, and was horrified to find that several of these children died in the same month in 1853. They had indeed all survived to be in the 1851 census, but a cholera outbreak in May took the lives of Hannah (4), William (6), Charles (7), Mary (12), Ralph (13), John (14), Thomas (16), and Jane (18). Eight of them. Can you imagine it? No wonder the parents moved the rest of their family away.

Slater's 1849 Directory of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire reports that at Reeth's November Cattle Fair (a big bi-annual event) prizes were awarded for the best cattle and sheep, and to industrious miners and labourers who had brought up large families. So that's the explanation.

Age at marriage

Of the 187 wives under 30 in the 1851 young family data set I have been working on, and assuming no earlier miscarriages or stillbirths (an unknown quantity), the following graph shows how old each young mother was when her first child was born.

It is fairly safe to assume that babies quickly followed any marriage so the graph also gives a reasonable distribution of age at marriage if you deduct 1 year from the labels on the x axis.

It seems that most marriages took place when the women were between 20 and 22. But given how common it is in the 20thC for a first pregnancy to end in an early miscarriage, maybe that estimate should be reduced by another year.

For comparison, the British Office of National Statistics say that in 1999 the average age for first marriages was 28 for women and 30 for men.

Death in childbirth

Of the widowed parents, 46 were widows and 32 were widowers, which suggests that childbirth was almost as dangerous as lead-mining.

Twins

I could find only 3 instances of young twins in the whole dale in 1851, and in each case the family already had at least 6 children. My heart sinks at the thought of it.

Illegitimacy

The censuses record a number of unmarried women with one child, sometimes more than one. In 1851 there were 23 apparently illegitimate children, though the word “illegitimate” only occurs once in the whole set of Swaledale census lists for 1841-1901!

Of the 1,417 Swaledale households in 1851, just 13 were run by single unmarried women with children. A further 11 included unmarried daughters with an acknowledged child (that is, the baby was shown as the householders’ grand-child).

I have read of couples who said their grandchild was their own son or daughter, to protect their unmarried daughter’s reputation. How likely is this? Of the family households, maybe 16 (0.01%) had a daughter still living at home and old enough to be the mother of one of the babies assigned to her parents. My reasoning was that if there was a regular string of evenly-spaced children, and then an age gap between the youngest and the next-youngest, it suggests that the mother had stopped having babies and her oldest daughter had started. It was also a clue if the mother was in her 50s. Here is an example:

John	Isabella	Elizabeth	John	Metcalf	Adam
Head	wife	step-dau	son	son	son
M	M	U	-	-	-
38	42	19	12	9	1

Even more telling is that although Elizabeth retained her father’s surname, Adam was given John and Isabella’s surname in the census.

I did not investigate the possibility than an unmarried son had an illegitimate child living with the family, although this is possible, given the level of deaths from childbirth.

I would be interested to learn more about contemporary attitudes to illegitimacy.

Contraception

We know now that nutrition levels affect fertility, and that the menarche is later in girls who are poorly fed. I have noticed only a few teenage pregnancies in the Swaledale data but when searching for absent spouses and a marriage date I quickly learned to check the GRO Marriage Index right up to just before the first baby’s birth.

It is clear that once a couple started having babies, they would continue for many years with alarming two-yearly regularity. I suspect that the occasional gap marks a child who died, rather than a six-month headache, but what did the women do for contraception? Abortion, infanticide or abandoning the baby must have happened occasionally. Rubber condoms became available in the 1840s, replacing those made from animal guts (the Open University website has a photograph of a condom to be secured by a red silk ribbon!) but diaphragms not until the 1880s. Acidic lemon juice was known for centuries to be an effective spermicide for sponge or douche but there are not many lemon trees in Swaledale. Maybe the local grocers (or their wives) obtained a steady supply and everyone said how much they enjoyed lemon tea.

Second marriages

An age gap in children, and an age difference in the parents, suggests a second marriage, like this:

Joseph	Ann	John	Joseph	Mary
Head	wife	son	son	dau
M	M	-	-	-
50	28	13	10	1

Twenty-two families in 1851 recorded the presence of step-children, which means that 22 widows had married again. But of course if a widower re-married all children would be counted as his sons and daughters (not his step-children), so it is difficult to establish how many second marriages there were altogether. Most married couples were the same age, or within 3-4 years of each other so, looking down the complete 1851 list for Swaledale for age gaps between parents and between children, and whether the wife was old enough to have borne the oldest child, I would say there were about 40 families where a widowered father had re-married. This gives a total of 66 second marriages for the dale, or about 5%. So almost twice as many widowed fathers re-married than widowed mothers, again illustrating the dangers of childbirth. Today, in Britain, the re-marriage rate is nearer 1 in 4.

But I remind myself that for many couples re-marriage was as much necessity as choice. Housing was very limited, work for women was very limited, and the reciprocal care and affection available to widows and widowers must have persuaded many to take on each other's children as well as each other.