A Bodwell family story · A Family's Life in America

Full Cradles, Small Graves

Big families, early deaths, and how close our ancestors lived to loss

What the records show

Anyone who spends time cleaning up the Bodwell family tree notices two things very quickly.

The first is how big the families were. Ten children was ordinary. Twelve or thirteen was not unusual. Henry and Bethia Bodwell had thirteen children in nineteen years, and many of their descendants did the same.

The second is how many of those children never grew up. Again and again, a line in the tree runs only a few months or a few years. Twins born and buried in the same week. A daughter dead at two. A brother dead at five. Sometimes three or four children from one family, gone within days of each other.

Behind the dates are parents who stood at small graves, often more than once, and then went home and kept going. This story is about them.

Why the families were so large

Large families were not an accident, and they were not simply a matter of faith, although faith was part of it.

On a farm, children were labor. From the age of five or six they fed hens, fetched water, minded younger children, and weeded the corn. By twelve a boy could do much of a man's work, and a girl much of a woman's: spinning, cooking, milking, and nursing the sick. Sons would later need land, and daughters would need dowries, but for years before that they were the family's workforce. There was no other.

Children were also the only real insurance against old age. There were no pensions. A father too old to plow depended on a son who would farm the homestead and keep him. Henry Bodwell lived to about ninety-one and spent his old age at the homestead, which his son Henry went on to farm.

And, bluntly, parents had more children because they expected to lose some. Nobody could be sure which ones would live.

There was also very little anyone could do to prevent pregnancy. A married woman in colonial New England could expect to have a child about every two years, from her early twenties until her forties. Bethia Bodwell is a good example. She married at twenty-two and had her last child at forty-two.

The danger of giving birth

Every one of those births was a risk to the mother.

A woman gave birth at home, attended by a midwife and the women of the neighborhood. If the baby was badly positioned, if labor went on too long, or if she bled heavily, there was little anyone could do. Days later she might develop "childbed fever," an infection now known to have been carried on unwashed hands, and die within a week.

Historians estimate that the risk of dying in any single birth was perhaps one or two in a hundred. That sounds small. But a woman who had ten or twelve children faced that risk ten or twelve times. Over a lifetime, something like one married woman in eight or ten died in or after childbirth. Most families knew one. Many lost one.

That is one reason the tree is full of second marriages. A farmer with a houseful of small children could not manage alone, so he usually remarried within a year or two. His new wife then often had children of her own, and the family grew larger still.

The first years

For the children, the most dangerous time was the very beginning.

In New England in the 1700s, very roughly one baby in ten died before its first birthday, and perhaps one child in four or five died before reaching adulthood. New England was actually healthier than most places. In the cities, and in the swampy South, the numbers were worse.

Babies died of things that seem minor now: diarrhea in hot weather, chest infections in winter, "fits," and fevers. Older children died of the great childhood epidemics. Measles, whooping cough, smallpox, scarlet fever and diphtheria swept through towns every few years. When one of them reached a farmhouse full of children, it rarely took only one.

Henry and Bethia's twins

The family's own story begins with exactly this kind of loss.

On January 27, 1685, in Andover, Bethia Bodwell gave birth to twin boys. They were named Henry, after their father, and Josiah. Both died within days.

The parents did something that looks strange to us but was completely normal then. When their next son was born, in November 1688, they named him Henry too. Giving a dead child's name to a later baby was common. It kept the name in the family and, perhaps, honored the child who had died. Family historians soon learn to watch for it, because it means two children with the same name may appear in the same family a few years apart.

Henry and Bethia were lucky in one respect. Of their thirteen children, at least eleven appear to have lived to grow up. But even their good fortune was not complete. Their daughter Mary died in 1716, in her early thirties. Their youngest, Phebe, died in 1730 at only twenty-nine. Henry outlived them both.

The throat distemper

A generation later, the Merrimack valley lived through one of the worst epidemics in American history.

In 1735 a disease called the "throat distemper" broke out in Kingston, New Hampshire, a few miles north of the Bodwell farms. It was almost certainly diphtheria, perhaps mixed with scarlet fever. It spread through the towns of southern New Hampshire and northern Essex County over the next several years. It killed children above all. In some towns whole families of children died within days of each other, and parents buried three, four or more at once. Haverhill, the Bodwells' mother town, was among the places hit hardest.

The family's records from those years deserve a careful look. Any Bodwell child who died in Methuen or Haverhill between 1735 and 1740 may have been one of its victims.

December 1864: Andover, Maine

The same kind of disaster could still happen more than a century later.

Ira Willis Bodwell and his wife Caroline Kendall Hall lived in Andover, a small farming town in the hills of western Maine. By the end of 1864 they had five children. Then, in a single week of December, they lost three of them.

Child	Born	Died	Age
Abby Agnes	23 Nov 1862	17 Dec 1864	2
Angela Elvina	31 Mar 1857	18 Dec 1864	7
Bradford Fremont	9 Oct 1858	23 Dec 1864	6

Three funerals in six days, the last of them two days before Christmas. The tree doesn't say what killed them. Three children of that age dying one after another in midwinter strongly suggests one of the contagious childhood diseases, very likely diphtheria or scarlet fever, both common in New England in the 1860s. This was the last winter of the Civil War, and the town would also have had sons and husbands away in the army.

Only the oldest boy, nine-year-old Flavel Augustus, survived. He grew up to become a minister and lived to be eighty. A year after the deaths, in November 1865, another son was born and named Neal Dow Bodwell. He lived to ninety.

It is hard to imagine that winter in that house. It is one of the clearest examples in the family records of how suddenly a whole family could be emptied.

Living with loss

It is sometimes said that parents in earlier centuries grieved less for their children because they expected to lose them. The letters and diaries they left don't support that. Mothers wrote of children dead for decades. Fathers carved careful epitaphs on small slate stones. Parents named later children after the ones they lost.

What was different was not the grief but the place death held in ordinary life. People died at home, not in hospitals. Mothers and sisters washed and dressed the body. The coffin stood in the front room, and neighbors came to sit with it. Children went to funerals and saw their brothers and sisters buried. Sermons and schoolbooks reminded them, again and again, that life was short and that they should be ready to die.

Faith gave many families the language to bear it. Gravestones of the 1700s and 1800s often speak of a child "fallen asleep" or "gone home." For a parent who had buried several children, the hope of seeing them again was not a figure of speech.

Then and now

The change came only recently, and it came fast.

Around 1900, roughly one American baby in ten still died before its first birthday. Then came clean piped water, sewers, pasteurized milk, and a real understanding of germs. Doctors learned to wash their hands and to deliver babies safely. Diphtheria antitoxin arrived in the 1890s, vaccines followed, and antibiotics came in the 1940s. Today fewer than one American baby in a hundred and fifty dies in its first year, and death in childbirth is rare.

For most of the family's history, a mother of twelve could expect to bury some of them. Today most parents never bury a child at all. The Bodwells of the past would find that almost unimaginable.

Reading the tree differently

Once you know this, the family tree reads differently. The short lines are not mistakes or missing data. Each one is a child who was named, loved and buried, and a family that got up the next morning and went back to work.

Some of those short lives are the reason we're here at all. A widower who remarried, a family that had another son after losing three, a mother who kept having children after burying her first two: our descent runs straight through those decisions.

Questions for the family's researchers

• How many children in the tree died before age five? A count by century would show how quickly things changed.
• Which deaths in Methuen and Haverhill between 1735 and 1740 belong to the throat distemper?
• What killed Abby, Angela and Bradford in December 1864? Andover, Maine, town records or a local newspaper may give the cause.
• Which Bodwell wives died in or soon after childbirth? Look for a mother's death within a few weeks of a child's birth.
• Are any of the small gravestones still standing? Photographs would be a fine addition to this page.