Navigating the Death of a Child: an analysis of 19th and early 20th century child commemoration rates in rural Cambridgeshire, England
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Victorian and Edwardian England, the grieving process involved numerous mortuary practices but the final and longest lasting of these is the stone monument placed over the grave or an engraving on an existing monument. However, comparison of burial records to monument records in rural Cambridgeshire, England would indicate that not all individuals received such a monument at their passing. This study explores the root of this variation through one of the most psychologically difficult deaths to navigate: that of a child. In this study, I compare those children who did not receive a stone monument to those that did as a function of the family’s socioeconomic class, the year of death, as well as the child’s age, gender, and place in the birth order at time of death. With a database of 11,578 individuals between the ages of 3 and 25 from 114 parishes in Cambridgeshire, this study is the largest of its kind and thus permits the exploration of interactions between these different factors. Using logistic regression modeling, I illustrate that the decision to erect a stone monument is demonstrably related to the child’s lived experience and the role they played in their household and community. Although rate of commemoration is not commonly explored in historical cemetery studies, this measurement offers valuable insight on the following themes: the emergence of adolescence and the ‘New Woman’, the drop in child fertility and mortality, the rise of the lower class over time, the role of girls within the household, the shift from conceptualizing children as economically useful to economically useless but emotionally priceless over time, the impact of major events like the agricultural depression and the First World War, and the impact that primogeniture had on the likelihood of commemoration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".