Sincere apologies for cross-posting.
Background:-
The Diocese of Lichfield have sold off the cemetery of St. John's Church
in the town of Wednesbury, England, for redevelopment. Virtually all
Monumental Inscriptions are to be broken up and the interred are to be
removed. I've now finished recording and updating a list of MI's relating
to the Churchyard.
This Churchyard has occupants from all sections of social class (ie from
the Titled, to merchants, to the poorest immigrant). Carrying on from this
I am now indexing all occupant's, not only those who have the benefit of a
MI, these total around five thousand.
The Problem:-
What constitutes an infant? I have burials of children with ages given in
hours (ie there are four with ages ranging from one hour to thirty hours),
days, weeks months and years, yet in the registers, in the same hand, and,
in a number of cases death occurring on the same day, the age is given as
infant (this being alongside an 'aged' indiviual). From the addresses
given these 'infant's' again vary greatly in social class. I'm unable to
find an unqualified definition despite an exhaustive search.
Does anyone out there have any ideas to throw into the melting pot?
TIA
Dave
ps. The raw data will be available to anyone who is interested in around a
month's time (FOC) It's in the form of an Excel spreadsheet (office 97
version) and gives full name, date of death, age at death and in some
cases place of death if it was away from Wednesbury (very few in that
category) and for those of you interested in American history/genealogy
this churchyard contains twenty two members of the Earp family, distant
relatives of Wyatt.
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