Re: "What would an morbo nigro mean in a 1792 death record? The Black Death? I cannot find even one reference to it on google" Can't resist jumping in on this; "an morbo nigro" sounds to me like Latin for a black death. Any Latin students here? If it is a Latin phrase, that would account for the absence of Google hits. Almost no one writes Web pages in Latin. I've looked more closely at the impact in England of the "Great Pestilence", as it was called when it struck much of Europe in the mid-14th century. However, it seems to have had roughly similar effects wherever it hit. It's also called "Black Death", "Black Plague", "Bubonic Plague" and simply "Plague". It did recur several times until fading into the background in the 18th century. The death rate was enormous, especially in the first wave; in some regions as much as 50% of the population; some villages were completely wiped out. The overall estimate is about one-third of the whole population. Today, the disease is 50% fatal if not treated and, of course, there was no effective treatment then. The impact on society was severe. Imagine seeing your relatives and neighbors apparently healthy one day and dead the next. In this deeply-religious culture, what was scarier even than death was death without opportunity for salvation. A Welsh poet described it as "Death coming like black smoke..."; he died of Plague in the Spring of 1349. Workers, being poor and ill-nourished, died at a faster rate than others -- creating labor shortages and then increases in wages and mobility. In England, I speculate, the turmoil led to the adoption of surnames by commoners (who hadn't had them before). Priests also died at a very high rate; some think the decimation of the priestly ranks led eventually to the Reformation. In France, some believed that the Plague was God's curse and this led to extreme cults. There is only a little scientific disagreement that the infectious agent was Yersenia Pestis (some say anthrax) but the symptoms of the present bug are the same as reported then. Most disease experts believe Y. Pestis (mostly carried by fleas on rodents) to have been the culprit. An even more deadly form (pneumonic plague) could be acquired by breathing in the droplets expelled by a victim's coughing. (This is one reason priests were more at risk.) -rt_/)