Where Did All the Children Go?

Monck’s Corner, Berkeley County, South Carolina, 1904

Doing research for a client last week, I encountered something strange. In every new census, the husband and wife I was following seemed to have a new set of children. For instance, their seven children in the 1900 census are almost entirely replaced by 1910. A couple stay the same, four are new for a total of six. Same in 1920.

I checked and double-checked I was looking at the same family from decade to decade and felt comfortable I was. So where did the children go?

The answer is as obvious as it is devastating: they died.

The family was black, living in the freshwater swamps north of Charleston, South Carolina, where they had once been enslaved. One could imagine that black infant mortality was high in that time and place, but was it that high? In their paper, “Death in the Promised Land: The Great Migration and Black Infant Mortality,” scholars Katherine Eriksson and Gregory T. Niemesh estimate black infant mortality in South Carolina for the years 1915–19. They statistically account for the fact that black families were less likely to register births and deaths, a process that only began in South Carolina in 1915.

What they came up with (see Table 2 on page 44) is a rate of 11.1. I checked the current rate in the United States, and it’s 10.8. So it’s comparable, right? I looked more closely. That number 10.8 represents infant mortality rate per 1,000 live births. In Eriksson and Nimesh’s study, it’s per 100 live births.

So just image: more than 11 percent of all black babies did not survive in South Carolina. No wonder the census returns looked so different. They’re dull, these documents, but dig deeper and you’ll find life with all of its heartbreak.

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