A while ago I was researching the history of a local woman who had passed away in the 1930’s. In my search, I found out that the business her brother had started in the early 1900’s was still going. In an effort to find anything I could, I contacted the office of the business and asked if they had any historical records. They said they did–a whole drawer full of historical articles, documents, and photographs. I asked if that included any family members… and they said yes!
I booked a time to come in and dig through the drawer. (I mean… look through the drawer carefully and respectfully.)
When I got there I found that, aside from some mentions of his wife and his brother who was also a businessman, there was nothing in the drawer about his family. Though the documents and photos were from the early 1900’s, they were all about the business.
As I was leaving, I thanked the person in the office for taking the time to let me look. They asked if I found what I was looking for and I said no, since I was looking for information about his sister or parents. The person told me that even if the founder of the business had family photos or documents, they wouldn’t have been kept. Why, I asked? Oh, came the answer. Because he and his wife never had children, so there was no one to pass those things on to.
/&
I went back to my car and took a few minutes to stare at my steering wheel. I don’t have and never will have children, so I couldn’t be angry that the businessman never had kids, either. But I never realized that if someone in history never had children, this would be a barrier to my historical research. Certainly, other researchers had already learned this lesson. Unless someone was notable or famous, history is most often passed down through families. Still, this realization didn’t sit well with me. After all, stories are often lost to history whether a person has children or not.
/&
Even in my relatively short time delving into research, I have plenty of examples where historical photos and documents left with children or family members have been destroyed because they were not stored properly and crumbled away in attics or rotted in basements. Even people with the best of intentions to save and pass on history are at times met with floods, fires, or other disasters that eradicate invaluable memories. There are cases where photos do exist–but there is no writing on them to know who the people were or when and where the photos were taken, rendering them essentially useless to even the most adept genealogical researcher. And, sadly, sometimes artifacts pass into the hands of people who just don’t care and into the dumpster they go. Ultimately, having children is no guarantee that family history will be preserved or passed on.
/&
As I thought about it more, I realized that most of the people I research did not have children. Not that I had intended to only research child-free people, but the type of people I’m interested in either couldn’t have children, or due to different circumstances did not have children at the time of their deaths.
I fall in love with people who were oddities, outcasts, and part of marginalized groups. And, granted, I also research people who are incredibly local, mostly people I discover strolling through cemeteries near where I live in Nebraska. Thus, I’m usually chasing after ghosts who have very little information about them out there to begin with. I stick to records that I can access: census records, cemetery records, and the graveled text of archived newspapers.
However, now that I’ve realized it, I have taken on a bit of a mission to preserve as much history as I can about the child-free people I find in my research. In many ways I feel like the limb of my family tree has not gone dead because I will never have children. Rather, it is a phantom limb, filled with the stories of the lost people I have found in history.
/&
The child-free people I have found can be collected into about four different groups.
1. People whose children all passed away before them
The woman with the business man brother I mention above did have three children. But they all passed away before her. She also had grandchildren who passed away before she died. Though she was not technically child-free, she lived over half of her life without children. This shaped the things she did and the decisions she made. Later in her life she opened her home to high school teachers and students in the area and had a positive impact on many people around her. But as we already know, her brother also did not have children, so there will be fewer future genealogists searching for them via their family tree. This is where community history initiatives, or people like me can do what we can to research and preserve their stories, which might otherwise be lost.
2. Children
It’s pretty obvious that if a person died when they were a child… they never had children of their own. And these stories can very easily be lost. The woman I mentioned above had three children but one died in infancy, in the 1880’s. When her obituary ran in the 1930’s, it says she only had two children. No one remembered the child who died in infancy. But her son dying in infancy was a big deal in her life. She was living in a town hundreds of miles away and still brought him back to her home town via train to bury him in a family plot. Her story would not be complete without mentioning this infant and this death.
Very often in cemeteries, the graves marking children will only say “infant” or “child of ___” with no other information. If they were the first child a couple had, they are easily left out of family records and completely forgotten.
Even in newspapers, young children’s obituaries don’t include a lot of information, so preserving these stories is difficult. If I do stumble on an obituary for an infant in a newspaper as I’m reading through, I will try to find if the grave is listed on Findagrave and upload it there, so at least it exists somewhere. This can be really tricky, as I said, graves (and even cemetery records) might not have any name except “infant” so I try to coordinate the date in the paper with the internment date or the surname of who owned the plot at time of burial to ensure I’m putting up accurate information. If I’m unsure about a grave listing, I usually don’t post it, because I tend to believe that no history is better than false history. See the end to a link of an example to an infant’s Findagrave obituary I’ve uploaded. (You’ll even see there the discrepancy in the surname spelling!)
3. Young adults who died before they had children
One of the saddest things I’ve found are young men who moved to another town to work in a factory or on a farm, then died in an accident at that factory or farm, and were not returned home for burial. They are buried by themselves in a cemetery far from home, away from family and neighbors, and I imagine not many people came to visit their graves. Granted, this is an odd occurrence. Many men who traveled for work and died did have their bodies returned home at the request of family. But I’ve found a handful of them who were not. Young women also died, in working accidents, or accidents at home. Things like disease did not discriminate, and after autos became popular, so too did car accidents, which took the lives of young adults before they married or became established. Since I study the decades between 1890-1920, I can say that a lot of people in this category died in WWI: soldiers and nurses in their late teens and early twenties, who gave their lives in the war effort.
The reason these people are forgotten is that often old family photos are labeled much later than they were taken, by an elderly family member. This elder lists off people they knew or can recognize, but there’s always that one aunt or uncle in a picture who “died before I was old enough to know them” and thus their names are forgotten and never recorded. There’s also the higher probability of these people not being buried in a family plot if they died far from home or unmarried. (Though not always true, many young adults are indeed buried on family plots.)
Either way, these people also tend to appear less in the papers because they weren’t very old–they didn’t get married, have children, or establish themselves in a trade long enough to be mentioned much in the papers, which is why any information about this demographic is important when I find it.
4. Disabled people
First off, I have to say this is a very mixed bag. Some disabled people I’ve researched did indeed have children. Just because someone is disabled, now or in 1890, does not automatically mean they could not have children. There are many examples of disabled people throughout history having children. But most of the disabled people I’ve researched locally did not have children.
This is mostly because of the reason above: due to their health issues, they passed away young, as children or young adults. Others had disabilities that with today’s medical treatment and support could have allowed them to have children… but by the standards of their day, it would have been life threatening. Still others had to deal with the societal stigma around disability that likely shaped their decision to not have children. For example one man I found was not born disabled but became disabled. He still got married but became despondent and depressed. Even though there is evidence that his wife and family was supportive of him, he sadly died by suicide in the early 1900’s, in his mid-30’s, having not had children.
Disability history is a complex subject. Disabled people I’ve researched have both seemed to want to fit in to the social norms of their day, but were also at times grateful to be ones who got to break out of those same norms. Of course, some people have better experiences than others, depending on their class, community acceptance, family support, and how the physical or emotional aspects of their disabilities impacted their daily lives. Some disabled lives of the past are tragic stories while others are full of interesting and vibrant experiences. And some are both, and some are neither. I love learning more about the experiences of my disabled ancestors, whether they had children or not.
5. Child-free people
And, yes, even in my time range of study, 1890-1920, there were child-free people. The book Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America offers some insight here:
“The sexual practices of middle-class marriage at the turn of the century had clearly moved beyond a procreative framework. In 1900, the total fertility of white American women stood at an average of 3.54., or 50 percent below the level of a century earlier.” (Intimate Matters, pg. 174)
One study done on 1,000 women who reached marriageable age before WWI and who were mostly born before 1890 was conducted by Katherine B. Davis and found that “74% of the women in the Davis study practiced some form of contraception, while even larger proportions believed that its use was morally right and that reasons other than procreation justified sexual expression.” (Intimate Matters, pg. 175)
This information certainly reflects my research on a local level. Even in small towns in Nebraska, it wasn’t uncommon for people getting married at the turn of the century to wait to have kids. One couple I researched was married in 1884, but did not have their first child until 1887, and went on to have more. Another couple I researched got married in 1899, but didn’t have their first child until 1905, and went on to have more. So infertility does not seem to be a factor and I doubt these couples got married just to twiddle their thumbs in the evenings for three and six years respectively. Also, both of these couples ended up having three children, not six, eight, or twelve. Certainly there were people who did have children right away after getting married or had many children. But most people that I’ve researched in this time period waited, and then had only two or three children. (Which would go on to change, because history doesn’t progress linearly. In the 1950’s, housewives having babies was all the rage which is why a lot of us can anecdotally say that our grandparents came from families of 8-12 siblings. Not to mention things like class, or rural vs. urban locales also impacted how many children people had, even at the turn of the century.)
There were also people who chose not to get married. Just this week I read a funny superlative in a yearbook from 1902 and decided to research the person. I found out the woman ended up never getting married or having children (that I could find. Granted, single women having children out of wedlock was covered up at the time).
She did, however, do a lot of work in her community, teaching Sunday school and running a Ladies Helping Hand group in town for several decades. This group helped many different women in need including one instance where a housekeeper was accused of stealing, and had to go to court. The Ladies Lending Hand paid her court fees and gave her money for a train ticket to safely return to her family in another state.
People who say child-free people are selfish never ran a Ladies Lending Hand, and it shows.
/&
Some might say that child-free people don’t matter or it is not a lens in which we should view society or history, but I disagree. Approaching some of my research from this lens has garnered a much more textured and interesting view of my local history, and will enable me to preserve stories I might have otherwise overlooked.
‘Til next we meet. /&
Links:
Book | Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
If you are interested in the child-free discussion, there is a free to stream virtual child-free conference held annually, visit childfreeconvention.com
