Deaths of Aboliht babies

2 Names: Ābolītis, Ports

Quite recently I have acquired a real church book that a Pastor of Trikāta parish Johannes Pohrt in 1820 started to fill in. There were several different books in a church, and one of them contained information about the people in all farmsteads and about the confessions of them. The present book is of this kind. The information in this book was gathered for approximately 15 years or even more, and during this time span some migration of people from a farmstead to farmstead occurred and it is registered in the book. The most important event, however, was the naming of people that took place here in 1826. It seems that the Pastor initially compiled the list of his parish members by farms without mentioning the hereditary names and later added the names also. Unfortunately, he did it with a lot of shortcomings

I can not claim that I understand everything in this book, and I could plan to publish it only later when some study of it would be completed.

I have chosen for a discussion in this Page only one record of the book concerning the farm Wezz Schures - now the name could be spelled Vecžūres - that belonged to the manor Wiezemhof, now Vijciems (in other sources the name is spelled - Wietzenhof). It seemed that this record could be interesting for the Chapter Death of this Site.

This is how the real text in the book looks:

And now I copy part of this information with some explanations:

Person name	Person name in modern spelling	Born	Died
Wirth Jahns Abolihts	Farmhost Jānis Ābolītis	February 12, 1787	Not mentioned
S.Wb. Marrina	His wife Māriņa	May 23, 1792	Not mentioned
1 S. Jahns	1st son Jānis	March 19, 1817	Not mentioned
2 S. Mattihs	2nd son Matīss	November 1, 1820	January 14, 1821
1 T. Anne	1st daughter Anna	July 7, 1822	July 29, 1822
2 T. Marrina	2nd daughter Māriņa	February 10, 1824	April 28, 1824
3 T. Leena	3rd daughter Liene	July 4, 1826	August 23, 1826
4 T. Sanne	4th daughter Zane	September 9, 1827	October 15, 1827
3 S. Gaspars	3rd son Kaspars	December 1, 1828	December 29, 1828
5 T. Lihse	5th daughter Līze	March 17, 1830	July 19, 1830

Wirth Brud. Jehkabs	Farmhost's brother Jēkabs	November 14, 1784	Not mentioned
S. Wb. Anna	His wife Anna	September 4, 1785	Not mentioned
1 T. Sanne	1st daughter Zane	June 11, 1814	Not mentioned
1 S. Dahwids	1st son Dāvids	February 20, 1818	February 5, 1821

I was shocked, looking at this list, by very high baby mortality. The spouses Ābolītis gave life to children regularly, but only the first of them survived, and next 7 babies died soon after their birth. More children are registered on another page that I have not scan. The information in this page says that the 9^th child Toms born in 1832 also died some month after the birth, but the death of the 10^th child Kārlis born in 1834 is not registered in the book. Maybe he survived, maybe the inscriptions in the book were terminated. Even Jēkabs, a brother of Jānis Ābolītis, lost his second child. What was the cause of the deaths? One can think that this family suffered of a hereditary disease, which could be possible, but the studies of other inscriptions in the book confirm that the mortality of babies was really high, though nobody suffered so much as Ābolītis family. Additional information on baby mortality in this parish is available in the Page on Vaccination.