End of the Line

[rjpaton]

Hi everyone. I'm a bit sad today - I just found out my great-uncle Hugh died ... in 1931! You see there were two brothers in this family in Glasgow - William Paton (b. 1903) (my grandfather) and Hugh Phillips Paton (b. 1908). They were both orphaned in about 1920 when both their parents died of pneumonia (I think it was the time of the Spanish flu epidemic) and they were taken in by the Craigielynn Boy's Farm in Paisley which trained boys in farming skills with a view to sending them off overseas for a better life. My grandfather was shipped off to Australia in 1923 and he never saw Hugh again ( I think this sort of thing happened quite a lot, didn't it). He always said that he thought Hugh had been sent to Canada and so the family always assumed he would have married there & we would have cousins and relations in Canada somewhere. So I was keen to find out about this & searched the passenger lists from the UK. I found William easily enough but not Hugh. Then, through this site, I found the links for passenger lists in Canada & after a thorough search found nothing there either. So I got to thinking, I'll bet he never left Scotland & so I searched for his death up to 2006 expecting it to be in the second half of the 20th century & lo and behold there we was - died of double pneumonia in Garngadhill, Glasgow in 1931 - age 23 & single. On his death certificate the informant is Joseph H Millar 'Occupier' (?). (I don't know what that means & interestingly the adjacent unrelated persons death record has the same witness. Must be someone from the infirmary where they were. The mother's name is slightly inaccurate too indicating the informant didn't know much about him). So he died quite alone by the looks of it with no other family. So its seems I haven't got any cousins in Scotland either - well perhaps some from the wider family. So this is a success story of sorts but I wish things had turned out differently. How sad.

Robert

Incidentally, it is amazing how many of my forebears died of Pneumonia - Hugh (1931), his parents William & Susan (1920), his grandfather William Paton (the police constable I have referred to before) in 1898. This must have been a widespread cause of death in Scotland around this time!

[trish58]

What a sad end to all your searching, but it does prove that by never giving up the search we will find the answeres though not aways the answere we were hoping for

On finding the causes of deaths in the family line I have made a list of all of the family deaths going back to the start of the records and it's amazing that chest complaints TB etc , and cancer tops the list so yes maybe the genes do have a big say in our lives and the outcome.

Trish

[joette]

How sad I do know how you feel when you have imagined a whole life for somebody & then you find that in fact their life was short or tragic or both.

You had imagined him off to Canada & a new start & instead he died alone?

Most of my family are carried of by infectious diseases eg Typhus,Typhoid,Cholera,Measles & TB.
The other fav is Bright's Disease aka as Renal failure-there are three lines on maternal/paternal side which have this as cause of death including on the paternal line a three generation-Mother,Son & Granddaughter.My Mother's Great-Grandmother & then her own Mother died of complications including this.Granny's brother died of renal failure too secondary to War wounds.
As my brother has this you wonder how much is hereditary.

In the main they were a healthy lot but accident & infection is what in the main carried them off.
With a flavour of heart disease thrown in to the mix.

[marypryde]

My Fife family of coal-miners/farm workers has amazed me with their advanced ages for the 19th Century. Life-long coal miners dying at 80 of "vascular disease of the heart" and "found dead in bed" at age 70.

A few cancers reported with surprising medical sophistication for such rural areas - "epithelioma of the mouth," and "carcinoma of the stomach." But even they were about 70 at the time.

Some of the women in my line, after many children and hard work, lived to 94 and 95 years of age and then died of "natural decay," which was probably the term they used for "old age."

The only young ones I've found were victims of mining accidents.

[puffin]

My natural grandmother on my father's side died in 1919 aged 28, and on the death cert. cause of death is Bright's disease.

Seeing mention on this string of Bright's disease being another regular cause of death alerted me to wonder......was it common in that era that someone so young might die of this cause?

Puffin

[joette]

They had no treatment for kidney disease in those days(dialysis & transplant didn't start until the second half of the last century)
As Hypertension is a common complication of pregnancy & childbirth this can lead to renal failure -this obviously happens to women of child bearing age.

Environmental factors eg lead pipes can also be a factor.Then you have infectious diseases & infections-e-coli being a common one.
It was also know as dropsy I presume because of the fluid retention.

My brother's is thought to have been caused by ironically antibiotics for recurring childhood tonsillitis.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/articl ... sease.html - 5

[rjpaton]

Thank you all for your commiserations and the very interesting info on your families diseases! Actually that is a very interesting aspect of family history - to see the various patterns of mortality over time. I know the GRO publishes these stats every year but it would be great to see the info for the 19th century & early 20th - anybody know where it is? There are some very interesting graphs at the Vision of Britain site but its just England &Wales but I imagine the trends would be very similar for Scotland. The URL is here:
http://vision.edina.ac.uk/data_theme_pa ... me=T_VITAL

Robert

[Currie]

Hello Robert,

In Parliamentary Papers there’s “Detailed Annual Report of the Registrar-General of Births, deaths and Marriages in Scotland”. The first of these, for the year 1855, was published five years late in 1861 but subsequent reports appear to have eventually caught up.

It contains about 35 pages of comment and about 200 pages of death tables for counties, cities etc with cause of death relative to age, sex, you name it. There most likely is a comparison over time in later years but I haven’t seen it yet.

There are about 100 causes of death listed grouped into 17 categories. For example in the whole of Scotland in the “Organs of Digestion” category just for females “teething” caused 495 deaths, 6 under 3 months, 30 from 3 to 5 months, 177 from 6 to 11 months, 253 age 1 year, 26 age 2 years, 1 age 3 years, 2 age 5 to 9 years. Total “teething” deaths for males was 519.

In that year in the whole of Scotland there were 294 deaths attributed to “kidney disease,” (218 males, 76 females) and of those a total of 13 were under the age of 10 years.

A much abridged version and without any of the tables is available in Annals of British Legislation 1862 http://books.google.com.au/books?id=K7k ... 4-PA180,M1

There’s nothing as detailed as this anywhere else online that I’m aware of and in Parliamentary Papers it’s only available as images and only if you're a member of a subscribing institution.

All the best,
Alan