Infant deaths

[Norfolk Nan]

I believe I after a name might indicate an infant in an early burial register - would that include a 3 year old? Ancestry’s definition is anyone under legal age???

[AdrianBruce]

... Ancestry’s definition is anyone under legal age???

That is a proper legal usage. However, it's a bit unusual, in my view, to see it being used for someone that old by anyone outside m'learned friends of the legal profession.

Then there's Infants' School - I don't know what today's terminology is, but I went to the Infants part of a Primary School (say ages 4 to 7-ish), then the Junior part, then Secondary School. But again, I suggest this is a restricted usage.

In general usage I would believe it to apply to someone much younger than Ancestry's 17y old. But I'm wary of thinking that there are any solid definitions. Mr Google seems to suggest that it refers to anyone of the age of 12 months or less - I wouldn't disagree with Mr Google, but I'd be surprised if everyone throughout the history of parish registers, has followed suit. In other words, I suspect an infant would not be a 3y old - but I'll bet somewhere it happened.

[Norfolk Nan]

Thanks, Adrian. It would be so useful if clerks had routinely identified children in burial registers somehow as they did at baptism. Call me picky…

[VALLMO9]

"The calculation of accurate infant mortality rates are prone to distortion by the usually undisclosed time elapsing between birth and baptism. Babies who died during this interval (which appears to have been lengthening over the 18th century), were not recorded in baptismal registers, while those who died around a year after their baptism may in fact have been considerably over a year in age. The age of the deceased is reached by subtracting the date of baptism from date of burial. Although this has little impact on the age at death calculated for adults, as noted above, for infants it may produce a significant underestimation of age.
A child who died two months after baptism may, in fact, have been four months old, if the interval between birth and baptism was itself two months. More importantly, a child who died 11 months after baptism and therefore counted as an ‘infant’ for the purposes of calculating mortality rates, may actually have been 12 or 13 months, and not properly an infant (‘infant’ being conventionally defined as 365 days or under).
The largest margins of error tended to be of children recorded as age one, who were actually either considerably younger, or nearer to the age of two. In Ilkley, for example, three infants who were allegedly one year old at death were in fact 48 days, 91 days, and 587 days old respectively".

The following paper doesn't answer Norfolk Nan's query, but it is a fascinating read. "Few deaths before baptism: clerical policy, private baptism and the registration of births in Georgian Westminster: a paradox resolved"
https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstr ... sequence=1

Example: "Examination of the intervals between birth and baptism and the fate of infants whose baptisms were labelled ‘P’ before c.1780 suggests that in this period ‘P’ referred to ‘emergency’ baptisms of sickly infants. These baptisms occurred fairly shortly after birth and were often followed closely by the death of the infant. In this case the recorded baptism may well refer to the private naming event. However from 1783 baptisms marked as ‘HC’ and ‘P’ were almost identical to other baptisms in the lengthiness of the delay between birth and baptism. Given the evidence presented here regarding local policy and the paucity of burials of unbaptised infants it seems likely that ‘HC’ baptisms (and ‘P’ baptisms after 1794) referred to the formal reception into the church of a prior private baptism. In addition to the complexities surrounding interpretation of these labels we cannot of course be sure that the absence of a label means that home baptism did not take place".

[Norfolk Nan]

Thanks, Mo. That’s very interesting. The child I’m considering would be within days of the third anniversary of baptism so probably safe to discount? Annoyingly, I can’t find an appropriate baptism for this burial so the question mark will continue to hang over him!

[VALLMO9]

You will often find cases where the first child of a marriage is baptised in a different parish from the later children. The explanation is that a young bride often went home to her mother for the birth of her first child, with mother acting as midwife. So the child's baptism can be a pointer to the parish where the bride came from (and can also imply that the maternal grandmother was still alive at the time of the birth).

In my own family, the above applied to my Mum's birth and baptism. My grandmother travelled from her home in Scotland to Kent to give birth at her mum's home, then decided to settle nearby.