Gravestone of Eliza Jane Pearce, Perranuthnoe, Cornwall. Photo Lesley Lawson, 2025.

After trawling through the archival data on my Pearce and Roach forefathers I find myself trying to understand broader patterns and their significance. The first is the impact on families of the high infant mortality that defined my working-class ancestors.

On my visit to Cornwall in 2022 I find the headstone of my great-great-great-grandaunt, propped up against the wall of the St Piran’s Church in Perranuthnoe. It bears the epitaph:

“This lovely bud so young and fair, call'd hence by early doom. Just come to show how sweet a flower in paradise would bloom.”

Named Eliza-Jane, she was the precious first-born of Henry and Jane Pearce and died in 1823, at the age of eight months.

Seventy-one years later, another Eliza Jane Pearce, my great-aunt (daughter of Eliza Jane Webber and James Pearce), died age five-and-a-half years old in a tragic railway accident in Barrow-in-Furness, as told in the previous post.

Eliza Jane Pearce gravestone, Barrow in Furness. Photo Rod White

My family history is littered with the deaths of infants and children. Before the advent of clean water, sanitation and modern medicine, infant mortality was so common that it hardly rated a mention.

For the Roach family of St Ives, toddlerhood was the time of greatest danger. Great-grandparents John and Wilmot Roach lost three children before they reached the age of three years. Their second-born child, Samuel, died age two years; their first-born daughter, Wilmot, died at fourteen months; and little Jacob died at three years of pneumonia, warranting a sympathy vote to Captain John and Wilmot from the local mayor.

The pattern is repeated with variations throughout the Roach and Pearce generations.

Children’s graves, Brompton cemetery, London. Photo Lesley Lawson, 2025

Symbolic reincarnation

Wilmot was pregnant when my great-uncle Samuel Roach died in September 1881. The child who was born in January the following year, my maternal grandfather, was also named Samuel.  Both Wilmot and Jacob were names reused by the Roach parents for children that followed.

This practice of naming a child after their deceased sibling was common in those times. I wondered if it was a strategy to keep the memory of the child alive, or some unspoken belief in migration of souls? Whatever, it absolved the family of having to prolong their mourning, getting on with life without forgetting the lost child.

Oxford University Researcher Stephen Bush puts it more elegantly. It was a symbolic reincarnation, he writes, where the deceased child contributes “to social life, by proxy, beyond their physical life.” Bush looked at over 9,000 death records for children under one year of age in England and Wales since records began in 1837 and found that over 20% reused the name of the deceased child. So, a common practice in an age of early infant mortality.

Much has been written in academic journals about the impact on the family of losing a child. One contemporary US study compared a group of bereaved parents with a similar peer group to understand lasting grief. Over 18 years later, the bereaved parents reported more depression and mental health problems than the comparison periods. They also had poorer general well-being, more health problem, and were more likely to have experienced marital disruption than were comparison parents. On the other hand, recovery from grief was associated with having a sense of life purpose and having additional children. 

1969 child death still remembered. Brompton cemetery. Photo Lesley Lawson, 2025.

Young widows

It was not just the babies that died before their time. In mining communities, the danger of the work led to early deaths of many young men whose wives were left to support the family.

I come from a long line of women widowed young.  For example, great-great grandmother Jessie Webber was widowed at the age of 30 years, great-grandmother Eliza Jane was widowed age 46, my grandmother Mabel Roach was widowed age 51. All their husbands struck down by miner’s phthisis.

Despite comforting religious and cultural practices, and community support, these deaths must have taken a terrible toll—particularly on women like Jessie Webber and Eliza Jane Pearce who had also lost children before their husbands’ deaths.

Much has been written about transgenerational trauma, and the psychosocial and biological methods of its transmission. It has been customary to focus on particular groups—the Holocaust, survivors of slavery and other genocides. It is now known that it can even affect the genes that are passed from parent to child through epigenetic modifications. But little is said of ordinary tragedies and how they may have shaped previous generations who lived in hardship and poverty.

Though not a miner, my own father died of lung disease when he and my mum were only 45 years old. I know only too well the long shadow cast by early doom.

Brompton cemetery. Photograph Lesley Lawson, 2025.

References

*Bush, S. J. (2019). Re-using the names of newborns: symbolic reincarnation in an age of infant mortality. Names, 67(2), 100–112. https://doi.org/10.1080/00277738.2018.1536186

*Rogers, C et al. Long-Term Effects of the Death of a Child on Parents’ Adjustment in Midlife, J Fam Psychol. 2008 Apr;22(2):203–211. doi: 10.1037/0893-3200.22.2.203