I assumed my great-grandparents Gertrude and Theodore Zoeller were partners. His life was remarkably successful. Arriving in 1845 as a farmer responsible for 2 younger siblings shell-shocked by the recent death of their mother onboard ship, he became a prosperous business owner and politician. From at least 1857 to 1859, he rented a store for his cabinet-making. It appears he specialized in elaborate furniture of mahogany carved with deer and fruit, representing the plenty that newly rich immigrants could afford. Theodore owned a $100 watch ($2000 in today's money) and a $200 piano - during the Civil War when the government needed money, they got $3 by taxing both.
$3 could pay for a far sadder thing than piano taxes - an infant's grave at Calvary Catholic Cemetery. In Queens, Calvary was an easy ferry ride away from the 17th Ward of Manhattan, where most immigrants lived. A contemporary wrote that funeral processions were constantly going up Fifth Avenue and crossing the East River, more than half of them for Irish children under 10.
And German babies.
My father-in-law's mother was an unaffectionate woman, and I wrote in a different post that she was the youngest of 11 children, most of whom died in infancy. I think her mother was reluctant to show affection, lest she lose this baby too. I wondered how poor Effie could stand, emotionally and physically, to keep getting pregnant.
But I just found out this was Gertrude's life too. 13 pregnancies! 13 births! Slightly more than half lived!
Ever since Ancestry came out, I've known from censuses that Gertrude and Theodore had 6 daughters and 2 sons, 1 son dying before age 10. The 4-year gap between Alexandra and Anna indicated a dead baby too. 7 living children out of 9 is a pretty good outcome.
Then the Roman Catholic dioceses of several cities released their baptism records. I found 2 more sons and a daughter! There were 2 children born and died in the 4-year gap between Alexandra and Anna, and another baby born just months after they arrived in New York. Did Gertrude think that God was punishing her for conceiving Leopold Otto before she was married? Or did she attribute the death to the stress of the voyage and setting up housekeeping in a foreign land? Either way, he must have been expected to die, because he was baptized aged 2 days.
Now, 7 living children out of 11 is not looking good. It is looking like the price of leaving rural Germany for life living in an American city. (However, I found out the child death rate in Germany was even higher).
Yesterday I found a new set of records on Ancestry, births marriages and deaths from the various localities of New York City. They are handwritten and sort-of mixed up - some in chronological order, some by village or town, some alphabetical.
When I say chronological, that's by the date the event was registered, not the date the event took place. Yet the date of the event is what is written - so I am looking at a list like this - April 6, 20, 15, March 23, April 30 - it's sort-of chronological.
It's the same with alphabetical. The registry books have a page for each letter. On that page, everyone whose last name begins with, say, E, is on that page in the order the event was registered - so the list looks like Evans, Egbert, Engelheim, Easter. To make matters worse, the clerks ran out of room on pages with popular surnames like S (think Smith, Sullivan, Schmidt), so they added them to the blank pages at the end, or middle, or wherever they found a blank page. Thankfully my name begins with Z, last page!
It's the same way with the locality. At some point the Village of College Point became listed in a separate section, not included in the Town of Flushing. So what I really had to do was look at just about every page.
However, it's worth it! This manner of record-keeping is just what you would expect from original records before they were neatened up by some bureaucrat. That's perfect, because no mistakes were made in the copying!
Under Manhattan, Deaths, Z, I was appalled to find 3 more children, and only one matched a child I already knew about. Now it's 7 living children out of 13.
I can't even imagine being pregnant 13 times, and giving birth, and breast-feeding, and care-taking, and nursing, and burying, only to do it again the next year, for 20 years. (I am starting to cry now.) I don't know how Gertrude lived thru it. Between grief and exhaustion, I don't know how she could lug pails of water up and down the stairs to do the washing, or stand over a hot stove. I guess that's what the maid was for. Or Amelia and Josephine did it. Maybe that's why she died at 61. (Hey! That's my age!)
While Theodore was running a business and building furniture, Gertrude was burying babies. In the 3 years that he was running for office and building schools, she birthed 2 babies and buried one. When he paid taxes on a watch and piano, she had just buried a baby and bore another. The contrast is stark.
In the late 1800s, 20% of American children died before age 5. Of those, ⅔ happened in the first year of life.
It was hard to keep children alive because the causes of death were so varied and probably found in combination. The diseases we can name and vaccinate against, like measles and scarlet fever, only killed a quarter of children. A third died from some kind of gastro-intestinal bug ingested from contaminated food, leading to diarrhea, often written on death certificates, and dehydration, which in the end caused convulsions, another word common on death certificates.
When my 2-year-old caught a bug on her first day of daycare, the vomiting started at 4 am and she was unresponsive by noon. But at the hospital, IV fluids solved the dehydration and she was fine in an hour. I can see the speed at which babies must have died and the fear that must have engendered in the family.
Another third died of respiratory illnesses. A small number died of birth defects or accidents.
Birth defects would consist of anything that would prevent a baby from gaining weight in the first month or so. Gertrude had 2 babies die of phlebitis. Surely that is not inflammation of veins in the legs, so I cannot figure out what it was. One baby died at 10 days old, and the other is unclear, so I am guessing phlebitis fits under birth defects. The 2-year-old died of congestion of the brain, and I cannot find that on the list of 1800s medical terms.
Zoeller, Alexander, age 11 days, address 66 6th Street, cause of death Phlebitis, burial Calvary
The biggest determiners of infant fatality were the separation of baby from mother and the father's earnings. 97% of babies with dead mothers died themselves. Mothers who worked outside the home also had babies likely to die. (This probably led to the 1950s prejudice against mothers who worked).
The reason for this is breast-feeding. If the father's income was very low (or zero because there was no father), the mother had to work. Mothers who worked at home or did not hold jobs were able to breast-feed. German mothers did not breast-feed very long and supplemented with food early. The results can be easily seen. In cities, German immigrants had child mortality that was 30% higher than native-born women whose mothers were also native-born. Other immigrants also lost more babies than native-born women, but the contrast was not as startling. Also, Germany had the highest child mortality in Europe.
Breast-feeding was life-saving because antibodies from the mother's immune system and probiotics good for digestion are transferred to the baby in the process. Even more important, breast milk is pure. The biggest problem causing disease was food processing and preparation, both of which could claim the phrase "dirty rotten." Now I understand why the Food and Drug Act of 1906 was so important. Cities had a great variety of food, much of it contaminated by E. coli and other bacteria. Milk was the biggest culprit. Cows carried tuberculosis. There was no pasteurization. The largest consumers of milk, of course, were children, especially babies. Summer, when food could not be kept cold, was known to be the time of baby death.
The father's salary made a big difference too, although it didn't matter if he was rich or poor, just whether he was poor or destitute. Fathers' money going towards food helped little. Americans largely ate enough calories per day. However, little was known about nutrition, and vitamins had yet to be discovered. The food and water consumed by the rich was just as contaminated as that by the poor. Even President Lincoln’s son died of typhus in the White House.
Theodore earned enough money to afford a live-in maid. But this luxury did not shield Gertrude from the infant mortality rate we find appalling today.
It didn't matter if the father was middle-class or rich, or what his occupation was, because being able to afford a doctor meant nothing. Before 1860, germs were unheard-of, and still not understood until after 1900. Germ theory was not taught in medical school; even the children of doctors and teachers died at the same rate as other professions’ children, A doctor could not cure any disease. The first disease to have a cure was diphtheria, and that was not until 1900. Doctors had no better death rates than midwives. In fact, doctors messing around with their dirty hands actually spread disease from one sickbed to the next. Hospitals were death-houses to be avoided at all costs.
So if rich vs poor didn’t matter, why was the father’s income vital? Fathers’ earnings had 2 important results - the mother did not have to leave her baby to work outside the home, and the home was larger. The size of the home mattered a great deal. If the ratio of people to rooms was cut from greater than 2 down to 1 or 2, infant mortality was cut in half. If the ratio was cut again to less than 1 person per room, infant mortality halved again. And where did big families live in few rooms? In cities.
a street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the Zoellers livedChoosing to live in a city carried a steep death penalty. The largest cities in the US had a 30% higher mortality rate than “cities” under 5000 people and rural areas. Rich native-born breast-fed babies, whose mothers had servants and were literate still died if they lived in cities. They died faster than poor immigrant babies with illiterate mothers who spoke no English and didn’t breast-feed, but lived on a farm.
Because population density was the biggest factor by far. The denser the place, the more efficient person-to-person contagion is. We re-learned this during COVID, with our 6-foot social distancing and fresh-air activities. Also, common resources like food and water supply are more efficiently contaminated when they are close to each other for delivery to masses of people.
In 1850, Gertrude had herself, her husband, 3 babies, her sister-in-law, and 4 boarders in her home. She had lost 1 baby already, and would lose one of those 3 children. In such an apartment, did Gertrude, Theodore, the 3 babies, and his sister share the bedroom, while the 4 male boarders rolled up mattresses in the living room?
Who lived at home? If home meant female family members who could help with child care, like Theodore’s sister, there was no difference in the death rate. If home meant boarders, it was a lot worse. By 1860, Gertrude had gotten rid of the boarders, but had 5 daughters and a maid. By that time she had lost 2 more babies. If Theodore had gotten her the maid to help keep the children alive, it wasn't working. Statistically, if home meant servants, there was only a slight difference.
Gertrude and Theodore lived at 66 6th Street at the corner of First Avenue, in Kleindeutschland, the German section of Manhattan. Everyone lived in tenements, apartment buildings 3 to 6 stories high with 4 apartments per floor. Each apartment was between 300 and 400 square feet and had between 2 and 4 rooms. Not bedrooms, rooms. Only one room had a window, and this was before electric light. The outhouse and the water pump for all 16 or 20 families were in the yard. Conditions were actually better in the 1850s and 1860s because the buildings were newer and the landlords had not gotten around to cramming more buildings on the 25 x 100 lots.
I can feel this because my daughter lives in a 400-sq-foot walk-up in Manhattan with 2 windows overlooking the yard, where the trash and recycling bins are. No sunlight reaches inside. It is long and narrow; when we sit on the couch, we can almost touch the TV. Crawling across the bed is easier than walking around it. Looking out the window gives a view of another building with brick walls and fire escapes; I could play catch with the person opposite me. The kitchen has mini-appliances and no counter. When I visit, we have to walk around each other. Walking up four flights of stairs worn from decades of thousands of feet, or throwing trash in the bin, looking straight up at a small square of sky, enclosed on 4 sides by brick and fire escapes, it is easy to imagine it is 1900. It is easy to imagine the 3 consecutive rooms: her kitchen and bathroom the kitchen, then living room, then bedroom on the far end.
Except that my daughter is one person. Tenement homes held families of 10.
Here is a chart of Gertrude and Theodore’s children and their ages at baptism and death. The baptism age tells us that they lived at least that long.
The following made no difference in the child mortality rate:
- wealth of family
- access to medical care
- amount of food available
- age of mother
- number of previous children
- education level of parents
- ability to speak English
- citizenship status
Statistics:
all statistics taken from Fatal Years
- 1850-1865, 7 upstate New York counties, probability of dying before age 5, urban 22.9%, rural 19.2%
- 1890, several US states, dying between ages 1-4, urban/rural ratio 2.07; dying before age 1, urban/rural ratio 1.63
- 1900, 88% of childhood deaths (under age 15) happened between ages 0-4; 59% of childhood deaths happened between ages 0-1
- 1926, Baltimore, fathers earning less than $450 per year had 16% child mortality rate; fathers earning more than $1850 per year had 3.7% child mortality rate
- 1900, US, of all professions, laborers' children had highest mortality rate. Skilled craftsmen, which Theodore was, still had a bad child mortality rate.
- 1900, US, the nativity of the father had no impact on the child mortality rate.
- 1900, US, immigrant mothers had a higher child mortality rate. However, the vast majority of immigrants lived in cities. Immigrant mothers living in rural areas had the same child mortality rate as native-born rural women.
- 1900, US, native mothers whose own mothers were immigrants had the same child mortality rate as native mothers whose own mothers were also native-born.
- If the home had 2 or more people per room, the child mortality rate was 25% higher than if the home had 1 person or fewer per room. However, fathers who earned more money could provide larger homes. Among fathers who earned the same income, homes with 2 or more people per room still had a 2% higher child mortality rate than homes with 1 person or fewer per room.
- The make-up of the family did not have an impact on child mortality, except for one type of person.
- Families with adult females besides the mother had the same child mortality as those where the mother was the only woman in the home.
- Families with servants only had lower child mortality if the mother was an immigrant living in an urban area, and then the improvement was slight.
- However, families that took in boarders had a 15% higher child mortality rate than families which did not.
- The following ethnic groups had high child mortality rates: African-Americans, Irish immigrants, French-Canadian immigrants, and German immigrants. This is because African-Americans had far lower income than other groups; Irish immigrants came to America after famine in poor health with few skills, and therefore had low incomes and lived in cities; and French-Canadian and German immigrant mothers breast-fed their babies for very short times.
- Jewish immigrant mothers had low mortality rates. This is because Jewish mothers breast-fed their babies for very long times.
- The Rocky Mountain region had very high child mortality rates.
- New England had the highest child mortality rates; the South had the lowest. This is due to New England being largely urban and the South being largely rural.
- Between 1880 and 1900, child mortality rates in the largest cities (New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia) dropped more quickly than in other areas because those cities installed water and sewer systems.
References:
https://calvaryandalliedcemeteries.com/
http://www.nymoon.com/pubs/undertone/dead/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvary_Cemetery_(Queens)
https://www.untappedcities.com/the-top-10-secrets-of-nycs-calvary-cemetery-in-queens-the-largest-in-the-us/
Tenement Museum, Manhattan, NY, https://www.tenement.org/
https://lespi-nyc.org/kleindeutschland-little-germany-in-the-lower-east-side/
https://www.villagepreservation.org/2019/03/01/kleindeutschland/
https://www.untappedcities.com/little-germany-nyc/
https://www.archives.nyc/blog/2019/5/16/the-early-tenements-of-new-yorkdark-dank-and-dangerous
https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/fatal-years-child-mortality-late-nineteenth-century-america, Samuel H. Preston and Michael R. Haines, 1991, Princeton University Press, National Bureau of Economic Research, Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth Century America
https://grandmasgrannysfamilyalbum.blogspot.com/2022/01/is-legend-true-lords-of-flatbush.html
Theodore and Gertrude Seller in 1850 US census, 17th Ward, City of New York, dwelling 165, family 352
Theodore and Grtraude Zeller in 1860 US census, New York Ward 17 District 6, dwelling 65 family 154
New York Roman Catholic Parish Baptisms, www.FindmyPast.com
Zeoller, Eugenie, in Manhattan, Deaths, Death Register, L-Z, 1858, p. 250, New York City Municipal Archives; New York, NY, Manhattan Vital Registers; Source Record Group: RG 095 Vital Records, New York, New York, U.S., Vital Records, Births 1847-1897, Marriages 1847-1903, Deaths 1798-1900, Municipal Archives, City of New York, New York City Department of Records and Information Services, Ancestry.com, 2023
Zoeller, Alexander, in Deaths, Manhattan, L-Z, 1864, p. 262, New York, New York, U.S., Vital Records, Births 1847-1897, Marriages 1847-1903, Deaths 1798-1900, Municipal Archives, City of New York, New York City Department of Records and Information Services, Ancestry.com,
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