Hi PJ Some sweeping generalisations there if you don't mind me saying so :-) Trying to compare the situation in Canada with completely different living conditions to Ireland of an entirely different time period is a case of apples and oranges I would say What a couple will produce in the way of children will vary enormously depending on many factors and with the best will in the world you can't draw much of a useful conclusion from even many thousands of examples (much less the 100 genealogies used in the study you mention) My advice would be to get the certificate and see if anything useful is noted, also check for a burial or evidence the child lived on Children are often registered with no name and also with a name that they do not use during their lifetime (ie registered as Patrick but known as Thomas for their lifetime) Although its England & Wales, a quick check of freebmd for births registered with no forename finds male CURTIS x 299 and female CURTIS x 266 You are also assuming that the parents married, many did not A mother having her first child is more likely to lose it than a mother who already had given birth to several Another thing to consider, even if the birth registration proves to record the right parents, it was not unknown for grandparents to register an errant daughters child as their own Nivard Ovington in Cornwall (UK) (the tenth child to a 44 year old Mum, I think she had got the hang of it by then :-) On 24/07/2012 17:08, pjsalis@hal-pc.org wrote: > > In my recent post about an incomplete indexed birth, I noted that the 1866 > birth of male-baby Curtis was a very late birth for the child's mother, > Catherine, and I wondered if the incomplete index entry may have signaled > that the child died at or soon after birth. I had three reasons for this > question: > > * I figured that Catherine married no later than 1838, since her > first-known child (John) was baptized in May 1839, and that she would have > been age 15-20 when she married. That would make her birth date > 1818-1823. If those dates were correct, in 1866 she would have been age > 43-48