On Sep 25, 2012, at 10:08 AM, Janis Walker Gilmore wrote: > They did die a lot, but sometimes one can't help wondering. > > My great aunt had 11 children. The first one lived to be nearly 100. The next three died as infants and a fourth died at age 2. Of the remaining 6 only the last one failed to live a long and vigorous life. Four in a row die and then five in a row are healthy as oxen? > > The family moved from Missouri to Oklahoma. Was it the water on their first farm? Privation and overwork didn't allow the mother to produce enough milk? I was working with a similar situation: eleven children of two married first cousins, children born in Belle Prairie and Hebron, Nebraska and Chicago, Illinois. First two sons survived to adulthood, then two daughters died before the age of three. A third daughter survived and then two sons died in Chicago, again before the age of three, then four more children were born in Chicago, all of whom survived to adulthood. I suspected the cousinship of the parents was an issue, but after stumbling upon two death records for the four early childhood deaths, it appears not. Nebraska recorded an 1885 state census, which included a page of deaths by township for that year only, plus cause of death and attending physician. Typhoid was the cause of death for one daughter. Chicago death certificates are slowly being transcribed for Chicago, and for one son who was born there in 1892 and died in 1893 the cause of death was "capillary pneumonia," acute bronchitis in today's terminology. Genetics seems less likely to me as a result of finding out the cause for two of the four deaths. Best regards, Debra MacLaughlan Dumes http://sakionline.net/familypage/