The unimaginable pain
There is always something unimaginably sad about the death of a child.
It isn’t that The Legal Genealogist doesn’t try to imagine it.
It’s that every time I try, my mind shies away from the pain that the parents and other family members of the child must have felt.
And looking at one of those death records this morning, that pain comes shining through without a single word being said.
It’s a death in Bremen, Germany — the city where my paternal grandmother’s family lived for generations. The particular death recorded is that of my great granduncle, Johann Hinrich Smidt, 156 years ago today.
He was born, the records say, at 11 o’clock at night on 3 December 1863. His father, Johannes Jacobus Smidt, reported the birth as required by law to the city Standdesamt — the registrar’s office — the very next day. The father is shown on the birth record as a 27-year-old Cooper and the mother — Johanna Henrietta (Hüneke) Smidt — as age 23.1
The parents — my second great grandparents — been married just two years when little Johann was born.2 He was their first-born child.
It’s easy to imagine how that first time father felt the day he stood in the Bremen Standesamt to talk about his son. The pride, the joy, the relief for the safe delivery of his wife.
It’s impossible to imagine how he felt just a little more than five weeks later when he stood there again, on the 11th of January 1864.
All the lost dreams, all the lost hopes, all the pain that he and his wife had to feel that day when he had to get those words out.
The words reporting the death of his first-born son.3
No, there’s nothing in the paper that records what he was thinking. No precise words that reflect the despair.
But there are hints in that record of just how bad that death had been.
First, it occurred at 4 o’clock in the morning — that deepest dark before dawn, on a cold winter day.
Second, the cause of death was krämpfe — cramps. Think of your five-week-old infant screaming in pain with cramps, dying in your arms, and you can’t do a thing for him.
And third, when that young father had to go and report the death, he didn’t take a neighbor or a co-worker or a friend around his own age with him to verify the death. No, he took someone who stood witness to that death much more personally: Johann Heinrich Hüneke, his wife’s father, the baby’s grandfather, went with him to tell the registrar of the loss — and signed the report of the baby’s death.4
No, it simply isn’t imaginable.
The pain of a father — and a grandfather.
The pain of a death in Bremen.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “A death in Bremen,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 11 Jan 2020).
SOURCES
- Bremen Standesamt, Zivilstandsregister, Geburten (Bremen registry office, civil status registers, births), 1811-1875, Johann Hinrich Smidt, Geburten 1863, Reg. Nr. 2342 (4 Dec 1863); FHL microfilm 1344173. Note that the father’s name is given, alternately, in the various records as Johannes Jacobus and Jacobus Johannes. Six of one… a half-dozen of the other… ↩
- Bremen Standesamt, Zivilstandsregister, Heiraten (marriages), 1811-1875, Jacobus Johannes Smidt and Johanne Henrietta Hüneke, Heiraten 1861, p. 458; FHL microfilm 1344201. ↩
- Bremen Standesamt, Zivilstandsregister, Todten (Deaths), Johann Hinrich Smidt, Reg. Nr. 54 (11 Jan 1864); FHL microfilm 1344232. ↩
- Ibid. ↩
I’ve seen grief evolve just in the space of my life. I’ve wondered for a long time what was it like when you had 14 kids hoping 7 would live long enough to become adults.
January is always a thoughtful month for me. One of my 3rd great grandfathers, Andrew Westerfield and his wife Elizabeth had 8 children. Starting on 30 Dec 1876 until 21 Jan 1877, the 5 youngest died of diphtheria. In August of 1877, Andrew would abandon his wife and remaining 3 children. He had been imprisoned in Camp Ford (Texas) during the Civil War so most likely suffered from PTSD. The death of his children put him over the edge. The events would have ramifications for the next two generations. Death may have been more common but the grief and psychological impacts were the same. Just not recognized.
I had been told years ago that my paternal grandmother had twins. It wasn’t until I found their death certificates on-line that the story of the twins emerged. J. C. and W. C., twin boys, were my grandparents first children, born when their mother and father were 18 and 22 years old respectively. J. C. died Sep 20 1920 at the age of 1 yr. 1 mo. 5 days (no cause of death). W. C. died Oct 4 1920 at the age of 1 yr. 1 mo. 18 days of malaria. My father was born two months later in Dec 1920. It breaks my heart to consider how happy my grandparents must have been in anticipating my father’s birth, only to have their hearts and souls pierced by a sword with the deaths of their firstborns.
My maternal great-great grandmother was the 6th of 10 children. Beginning in 1816 my third great grandmother had a child about every two years, give or take a couple of months. Then there was a gap of three years between a child born in 1824 and my ancestor in 1827. After her there were four more children born at two year intervals. Never gave it much thought until I recently found birth records for all of the children and there was in fact a child born in March of 1826 who must not have lived very long because my grandmother was born in March of 1827.
It gave me pause as to how my future might have changed if that baby born in 1826 had lived.
Can I offer, perhaps an alternative perspective. I think we are all practicing “presentism” here. We are putting our standards of grief on a century ago death. Yes, I am sure the loss of a child was difficult no matter the era, but if we apply our standards to that loss I am not sure we are being accurate. (now, don’t shoot me here.) Children were an economic commodity. The more children you had the more economically solid the family might become. The death of a child when 50% of the children died, was probably viewed more pragmatically than we are imagining, using our present loss rate of infants of less than .5%. This idea that they mourned to the level that we do is just not realistic…..it was too common place to spend much time on it. (Let the arrows begin.)
I can’t imagine the death of a five-week-old first-born would be any less grievous a loss then as now.
Jill is correct in saying that if we pronounce without evidence, we are going to project our own feelings onto the past. So it is vitally important that we known what they said about this. And they did – in writing anyway. There is a whole book of letters about death written by Australian (mostly women) back to family in England after the death of children and others.
My own distant g…father, a minor Scottish poet, around 1817 wrote a poem on the death of his 5th child/2nd daughter who died at the age of about 2 1/4 at a time when her personality was becoming evident. He followed up a year or so later with a memorial poem. Both were sorrowful, but celebrating her qualities and hoping she was OK in the hereafter.
There are also occasional newspaper reports of a parent (usually but not always the mother) being devastated by a child’s death, or a series of them, and having to be provided with some sort of psychiatric support.
So we do have evidence that SOME people felt sadness.
Even if it was a bit different from now, they were not unfeeling creatures.
The only difference between “then” and now that I can think of, is that the grief may have stayed more internally than it does now. My father was the last of several children and when I found a record of the birth and death at a very young age of a brother, second born, I asked my dad about it and he had no idea that this child had been born. I think that people just didn’t talk about it and, as time goes by the “lost” children, are unknown. Yes, in the past, life was much harder than it is for most of us now but I can’t imaging carrying a child for nine months, having it alive at birth and having it die at a young age would not have hurt as deeply as it does now. I also can’t make myself believe that children were thought of by their family members as an economic commodity over being someone to be loved and cared for so that they could, hopefully, prosper and grow to adulthood!!
The world certainly wasn’t as child-centric as it is now… but I’m with you on the emotional impact of a baby’s death.
Thank You Judy, your rendition of this event in your ancestor’s lives is something we should all contemplate when it comes to our own genealogy. Instead of recording the cold, hard facts, we should be also be recording the emotions and feelings that were surely felt. While we can’t be 100% accurate, we can record what we believe would have been the emotions and feelings of our ancestors. We are always trying to find ways to put “meat on the bones”. This is one way.
On January 23, 1888 my great-great-grandparents lost their youngest son at the age of three. As the ground was too frozen to dig a grave, my g-g-grandmother was able to take some of her son’s favorite toys to the cemetery several days after the funeral and ask the gravediggers to open the coffin so she could put them in with him. Don’t go telling me that people back then only viewed their children as an economic commodity.
Some gravestone inscriptions for children of the time express grief quite eloquently.