How many people die in December?

[Lancashire Lady]

A question exercising several minds on another forum I visit.

This concerns the parish registers for a village in North Yorkshire. I am currently looking at the microfilmed registers, not BTs.

Someone commented on a dearth of burials recorded for the month of December for several years, noticeably in the 1860's. Having the film available, I offered to check & can confirm there are indeed several gaps. These cannot be accounted for by having pages missing, as all the entries are consecutive.

Haven't completed a full statistical examination yet, but for most of the years between 1850-1880 there would seem to be anywhere between 2-6 burials in December. However, for at least 5 years (not necessarily consecutive) there are no burials recorded at all, sometimes for as long as 6 weeks, and in one case for FOUR MONTHS (24 Sept - 24 Jan). This seems a bit odd, given that colder weather is usually the last straw for people already weakened for other reasons.

Suggestions already more or less discounted:
The Vicar was on holiday - there are baptisms and the odd wedding recorded for the same period

The ground was frozen & it wasn't possible to dig graves - so you might expect several burials on the same date when the conditions improved (not evident in these registers). But surely, if December was that cold, it wouldn't suddenly thaw out in January?

Any more ideas?

[kiterunner]

I would think it's just by chance - if there are usually between 2 and 6 burials in December then 0 isn't that far off. But you could try looking at neighbouring parishes to see if anyone from that parish was buried in one of them.

[Kit]

I think you would need to look at every month not just December to see if there are more or less burials in December. You can't just compare December months.

[kiterunner]

Yes, it could be that more people had died in November, for example.

[Phoenix]

Some months (February springs to mind) tend to have more than their fair share. And if something infectious went the rounds, bumping off the weakest, you might expect later months to be burial free. As Kit says, you would need to look at the whole pattern.

[Merry]

When trawling the GRO indexes for death records, I have usually found the Jan-Mch Q to have the most deaths by quite a good percentage, followed by Sept-Dec, then Apl-June and lastly the summer Q.

[Nell]

I dimly remember reading somewhere that more people die in Jan-Feb-Mar than in Dec. It's usually colder in those months for starters. But you'd need to look at how many people lived in the village and their ages etc. A shortage of Dec deaths in one village doesn't really mean much statistically. It might be that they were buried elsewhere too, so wouldn't be recorded in the parish burial register.

[Lancashire Lady]

My own thoughts are that its just a statistical blip.

When you look through the registers there are periods where there seem to be a glut of deaths, such as 5 or 6 babies in a month, or a run of 8 men buried over several weeks, but no women or children during this period. (This latter was also cause for concern - can the registers be relied on to be accurate, or was the vicar or his clerk a little lazy in keeping the records up to date.)

I need to do some stats on the figures to be sure: at the moment I'm going through the registers checking the dates against the transcripts I've got, so I can be sure the dates are genuine & not down to mistranscriptions. I also have access to an adjacent parish so I'll check those too. There was some traffic between the 2 villages but on the whole I think the trend would be INTO the village I'm looking at, not out of it, as it was more of a regional centre.

[Uncle John]

I would favour the frozen ground idea. Winters were very cold then. But you'd need to compare registered deaths with recorded burials.

[JBee]

I wonder whether it could a family thing too.

7 siblings all except 1 died in March (different years).

[Lancashire Lady]

I would favour the frozen ground idea. Winters were very cold then. But you'd need to compare registered deaths with recorded burials.

So why are there burials in Jan & Feb when there aren't any in December?

As for comparing the registrations with the burials - they all seem to match up, in that I seem to have registrations in the right quarter for all the burials [more or less anyhow - I'm finding errors in the GRO index, but that's another story]
However I can't check them all precisely because I'm not forking out for several dozen certificates to check the actual dates lol

I can't check the other way round though (registrations against burials) as this registration district covers several parishes, and I don't have access to all the PRs (even if I had the time & inclination to try to cross-match them all)

[Uncle John]

So why are there burials in Jan & Feb when there aren't any in December?

That's just being picky.

[Phoenix]

Not sure that it would hold good in Victorian times, when there might be access to tinned or bottled foods and imported corn, but times would be particularly hard in Jan- March when there would be little fresh food, plus cold, damp houses. The flu season today only seems to start up after Christmas.