Plagues, Pandemics and Genealogy: A Return Visit

 

In 2018 and 2019, I wrote a couple of blog posts about plagues and genealogy. Little did I know that just a short time later, I would be living through a major, worldwide pandemic. Such events have both short term and long term effects on genealogically significant records and thereby on genealogical research. 

When I was doing a special project digitizing old burial records beginning in the 1800s at the Mesa, Arizona City Cemetery, I became painfully aware of the effect of disease on the mortality rate, especially of young children. These records graphically illustrated the danger of the then lethal childhood diseases. So many of the children under the age of 5 were dying and I became so emotional about the records, that I had to stop reading the individual records when I saw that child had died. 

When you become involved in genealogical research, almost immediately you find the reality that mortality rates vary over time. Death rates are usually measured as the number of deaths per a fixed number of people such as "deaths per 1000 people" or as is currently being used with the COVID-19 pandemic, "deaths per 1 million of population." For example in the United States, from 1950 to 2020 the death rate per 1000 has varied from a high of 9.649 per 1000 in 1950 to a low of 8.131 in 2009 and the projected death rate in 2020 is expected to be 8.880. See "U.S. Death Rate 1950-2020." The same website has a list of the current death rates by country for 2020 and Latvia is at the top of the list with a death rate of 14.740 and Qatar is at the bottom with a death rate of 1.298 per 1000 of population. 

How does a pandemic affect the overall death rate? Quoting from an article entitled, "A pandemic primer on excess mortality statistics and their comparability across countries, by Janine Aron and John Muellbauer (Institute for New Economic Thinking, and Nuffield College, University of Oxford), alongside Charlie Giattino and Hannah Ritchie (Our World in Data, University of Oxford).

Excess mortality data avoid miscounting deaths from the under-reporting of Covid-19-related deaths and other health conditions left untreated. Excess mortality is defined as actual deaths from all causes, minus ‘normal’ deaths. 

In other words, you can see the effect of the pandemic independent of any inaccurately reported data due to politics or other factors. For the United States, these statistics, the difference between the observed numbers of deaths in specific time periods and expected numbers of deaths in the same time periods, is maintained by the Center for Disease Control or CDC. As a side note, you may be able to understand why the CDC has become a lightning rod for politicians. Do your own research. You can see the extensive charts and supporting data on the CDC webpage, "Excess Deaths Associated with COVID-19." Also, in case you are wondering, the United States presently (as of the date of this post) has the highest number of deaths per 1 million of the population of any country in the world although this figure is reported deaths and does not take into account under-reporting by some countries and even under-reporting in the United States. 

As we, as genealogists, go back further into the past, we will see that mortality rates increase particularly among infants and young children but discovering the excess death rate caused by any one particular disease becomes less possible. Estimates from the past suggest that about half of all the children born before 1900. The global youth mortality rate in 1950 was 27%. The global infant mortality rate in 1950 was 16%. Currently, the youth rate is about 4.6% and the infant mortality rate is about 2.9%. Of course, some countries have mortality rates much higher than the average. See 

Our World in Data. “Mortality in the Past – around Half Died as Children.” Accessed August 8, 2020. https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past.

Do your own research if you disagree. 

What does this mean for genealogists? The obvious fact is that many people died without being recorded and that the overall mortality rate increased during plagues and pandemics. If people seem to disappear from a genealogical record, it is probable that they died and their deaths may not have been recorded. Learn about the history of your ancestors with reference to plagues and pandemics. Do your own research.