Generations with few children

I heard a program on the radio (yes, there still is radio) the other day about the current millennial generation choosing to have fewer children than their parents had or no children at all. I don’t know if that is true or not but I suspect it might be as this current generation is considered to be very self-focused (selfish?) and not as tuned into procreation as their predecessors.

In Canada, according to the 2016 census, for the first time in the country’s history, the population has more seniors (16.9%) than children (16.6%). The gap is expected to widen in the future.

Another apparent trend is that people are waiting longer to have children – particularly females – than was the case with their parent’s generation. Fertility is declining. In Canada it is 1.6 children per woman (in the US it is 2.0 children per woman). The trends for most age groups, since the post-Second World War years, is noticeably declining. This is true in the UK as well where women who had turned 45 in 2016 had an average of 1.80 children compared to 2.21 for women who had turned 45 in 1944.

Some analysts attribute the outcomes to increased housing costs and slower wage growth that would certainly affect people’s abilities to raise a family. Job security may also be a factor. Many readers of this will relate to the difficulties their offspring have encountered in establishing themselves and reaching economic security.

What we are seeing may be unique in human history, where one generation decides not to produce a subsequent generation, or produce fewer children such that their own generation may not be replaced. It will be of especial consequence to western civilization as there certainly appears to be families in other parts of the world who have no problem with spitting out children one after the other.

Older people might be concerned about this trend as their own retirement and pension programs may depend on there being a large workforce contributing to government authorized retirement schemes.

Our economy and well-being cannot continue without a healthy labour force paying the bills through their taxes, particularly where social programs for seniors are in place. For just the public-sector pension plans in Canada, the unfunded liability that will be passed to future generations, with no additional people added to the rolls, is already in excess of $300 billion. Many private companies have fallen on hard times recently with the result that employee pensions have been reduced or even scrapped. Bloomberg recently reported that the pension plans of the 200 largest S&P 500 companies also are unfunded to the tune of $382 billion.

For most western nations, the answer will have to come from immigration. Families of the future may look much different – certainly than they did in past centuries. Besides being smaller they will undoubtedly have a greater mix of cultures and races necessitated by the influx of people from all over the world.

My First Car

I was watching a period program on TV the other night and saw an old car that looked a lot like my first one. Very strangely, and disappointingly, in all of the thousands of photos and movies taken by my parents and me over the years, there is not a single one of that first vehicle. What male (perhaps female as well) does not have such a picture!

I had to go online to find a picture of a 1950 Austin like the one I owned. I don’t recall mine had the rear, chrome fender guard, but it was black and very similar to the one the one shown below. It had four doors just like this one, though.

The signal indicators on my little Austin were arms that flipped out from between the doors. They were cute but the cold winter weather in Alberta often meant they would stick shut and you’d have to crank down a window and use your arm. Who remembers learning to signal that way? It was sometimes necessary to scrape frost from the inside of the windshield when the defrost heater could not keep up. The dashboard was fake-wood grain which was kind of classy. The seats were leather. It was a manual, stick-shift model and fun to drive.

As youngsters, most of us probably worked at odd jobs and saved money to buy our first car. My sister and her husband gave theirs to me (and bought another Austin) but it needed quite a bit of work. So a lot of the funds from working (and from parents of course) went toward repairs and maintenance. As with all old cars, the engine required attention as it burned more than a bit of oil. In this case that meant a total over-hall. My dad showed me how to do that. I had to strip the entire engine down and pull it out using a block and tackle. Austins of this time period had cast iron engine blocks and they were very heavy. Even pulling off the head was a task requiring some strength. 

I remember doing the same head-gasket replacement on a Chrysler Simca some years later. I had braced myself over the engine, prepared to lift the presumed heavy part. I was expecting the same experience I had had with the old Austin. But it was made of an aluminum alloy and when I pulled hard to lift it off, it was so light I almost threw it through the hood!

Anyway, we took the engine block to a local machine shop and had the cylinders bored out. That meant replacing the piston rings with larger parts. I think I worked on almost every part of that engine, certainly finding out how things worked. I know I changed out brake shoes and had to put in a new clutch plate. The latter gave out when I was driving downtown and had to come all the way home speed-shifting without the use of a clutch. Readers who know something about stick-shifts will appreciate how this is done.

I learned a lot during this physically-challenging, mentally-frustrating and knuckle-bashing exercise, probably including some really bad language. It was character-building but reinforced my desire to never be an auto-mechanic.

I drove the car for a few years. It did the job for me. I don’t remember why I traded it for the Simca although that was a neat car, too. I am sorry I have no pictures of it either. I often wonder what it would be like to have an old Austin like this again to run around it. With its small size you could certainly park it anywhere and it had lots of room for passengers.

We don’t usually think of cars and trucks as being part of genealogy, but if you think about it, they are every bit a part of family history as a house, or an antique table, or even a vintage milk can such as I have sitting in front of me right now that belonged to my grandfather. Driving has been part of families for over a hundred years. There are many photos in our albums of individuals and family groups posing with their old cars and trucks – except for my first one!

We have seen major developments in style, components and reliability over the decades. It became goals for most families to have a house and a car, especially in North America where great distances had to be covered for work and leisure. Vacations were often designed around driving. Our families had many different makes and models to choose from. Their diversity and the use to which we put our cars are very much a part of our family history.

Getting your very first car is one of the important stages in growing up. I had not thought about mine for a long time but memories of it readily came back as I started to write this. 

Natural Disasters and Family Misfortunes 12: 1811-12 New Madrid Earthquakes

We just passed the 206^th anniversary of the New Madrid, Missouri, earthquakes. The first tremors were experienced on 16 December 1811. They continued into March of 1812. The apparently strongest earthquake in US history occurred on 7 February 1812 with an estimated magnitude of 8.8 on the Richter scale. That would make it ten times as large as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake (blog post 13 June 2017).

The family of my 2^nd great-grandparents lived in Washington County, VA at the time. I am sure they felt the shocks but would not have known from where they originated.

There are many technical summaries of the event and reports done by the USGS.  A few can be found at: Bicentennial of the 1811–1812 New Madrid Earthquake Sequence

This report offers a great summary of the events, geography involved, images illustrating the destruction and first-hand accounts: “The New Madrid earthquakes occurred along the western frontier of the young United States. They were felt in all settled parts of the central and eastern United States, as well as in Toronto, Canada. They caused general alarm from Detroit, Mich., to New Orleans, La. Chimneys were knocked down as far away as Cincinnati, Ohio, 560 kilometers (km) [350 miles (mi)] away. Closer to the earthquakes, Memphis, Tenn. was not yet established, but in St. Louis, Mo., many homes were damaged. The thriving frontier trading town of New Madrid, Mo., was damaged severely and temporarily evacuated. About 45 km (30 mi) south of New Madrid, Little Prairie, Mo., was destroyed. During the earthquake the ground rose, fell, and cracked; trees snapped and were uprooted; large landslides were abundant on steep ground from the future site of Memphis, Tenn., to southernmost Illinois. Large areas rose permanently, and some of them dammed rivers to create or enlarge lakes that remain (Reelfoot Lake, Tenn.). Other large areas sank and were flooded by streams and enormous volumes of water and sand that erupted from thousands of fissures over a region about 240 km (150 mi) long and 80 km (50 mi) wide. Great waves on the Mississippi River and collapsed banks and sand bars destroyed some boats and washed others ashore. A sudden uplift beneath the river caused it to overflow its banks, briefly flow upstream, and form two large rapids.”

Summary of 1811-1812 New Madrid Earthquake Sequence

The Great Midwest Earthquake of 1811

New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-12

1811-12 New Madrid Earthquakes

1812 Earthquake causes fluvial tsunami in Mississippi

The New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-1812

 

A tinted engraving shows the clearing of a passage on the Missouri River for riverboats from the Kozak Collection at the Earthquake Engineering Research Center, University of California, Berkeley; downloaded from The New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-1812

Because the region affected was still sparsely occupied, there were few deaths as a result of the event. Notwithstanding that, there was significant property damage including the total destruction of the town of Little Prairie, MO. The quake actually caused a tsunami on the Mississippi River that upturned boats and eroded banks. Certainly hundreds of families would have been affected, some perhaps losing all that they owned.

These kinds of events may be little known by most people, let alone family researchers. But they no doubt had enormous impact on communities near where they occurred.

Ancestry lists 45 people, likely just the householder, living in Little Prairie, Missouri, on their US Census Reconstructed Records in 1810. The region around New Madrid had been settled by the French during the 18^th century. Most of the men named on the census were of French origin. A search of later census record on Ancestry resulted in no one living in Little Prairie. Nine names, at least similar sounding, resided in nearby centres of Cape Girardeau, Louisiana and St. Louis, in 1820. Seven individuals were in Missouri in 1830.

One prominent family in New Madrid started in Little Prairie. Raphael Lesieur appears on the 1810 census list of Little Prairie residents, along with several apparent other related Lesieur families. He was born in Trois Riviere, Quebec in 1777. He and wife, Marie-Francoise Guilbert had one child in Little Prairie in 1810 and nine others after they moved to New Madrid. Lesieur Township, now part of New Madrid may have been named after the family. According to author Goodspeed’s History of Southeast Missouri (page 901), Raphael “came to Missouri in 1798, locating in what is now Pemiscot County. . . but during the earthquake of 1811-1812, the farm of which he resided sank and became part of a lake. He then removed to New Madrid Coutnry, and settled on a farm in the neighbourhood of Point Pleasant…” Raphael died in New Madrid, Missouri in 1855.

One wonders what the history of this family might have been if they had not been driven away from their first home in Little Prairie by the effects of a major earthquake.

Reference:

Goodspeed's History of Southeast Missouri: Embracing an Historical Account of the Counties of Ste. Genevieve, St. Francois, Perry, Cape Girardeau, Bollinger, Madison, New Madrid, Pemiscot, Dunklin, Scott, Mississippi, Stoddard, Butler, Wayne, and Iron.

Chicago: The Googspeed Publishing Co., 1888