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A Population Bomb in My Family Tree
So many people! What will we do?!?
Do you come from a big family? My dad did. He was the second of five children, which we would call a big family today. His dad was the fifth of ten, a big family by any standard. Large families used to be a lot more common in the United States, but now there are just a few groups of people, like the Amish, which consistently have families of five or more children.
What happened?
The documents we can find through genealogy can give us a picture of what life might have been like for our ancestors. Big families were a defining feature of life for my ancestors. So many siblings! Aunts and uncles and cousins everywhere! I wonder what it must have been like, especially for the moms.
Childbirth was and is dangerous, and there are several places in my family tree where a mom dies young. But it isn’t just childbirth. I think about what it must have been like for a mom to have all those children under her care. At one point my dad’s mother had five children under five! So much work. Double that for my great-grandmother! I have deep respect for the work and love of our mothers, and I can also see why my grandma gave up on the idea of working outside the home.
It is the realm of demographics to study population-level trends. As a genealogist, I can look at…
