After completing over 150 hours of death and mortality record transcriptions of the 17th and 18th centuries, it is both fitting and necessary to take a step back and humanize the numbers. Given the sheer quantity of deaths as well as the temporal distance between us and them, it can be easy to forget that each number represents an individual who lived and had a future, a family , and a story of their own that will only live on through their final moments. If their cause of death is the only glimpse into their lives that still exists, then we must ask ourselves what can we learn about these individuals through such documents? Apart from being a student at GMU, I also work as a history interpreter at the Mount Vernon Estate where I get to educate the public about the life of George Washington in great detail. Subsequently, one of the most common questions I am asked on a daily basis is what General Washington ultimately died of, to which the answer is Quinsie, or a bacterial infection of the throat. Quinsie also happens to be one of the causes of mortality listed in both the Millar and Guildhall general records, and each time I come across this cause of death I can’t help but think of what it might be like if the only trace we had of Washington was the way in which he died. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
As Historians, bringing to light those from the past is perhaps one of the greatest challenges we face within our work. Even if our job centers around data analytics, one cannot help but be reminded of the real human suffering that hides behind each number and the untold stories they mask. This week, professors Jessica Otis and Megan Klingeman published a blog post on the Death by Numbers front page which does a fantastic job at uncovering one particularly tragic incident from these documents; 28 individuals who were killed by a gunpowder explosion in the year 1650. Through their research they found that later reports stated the blast “took out 15 houses, made 26 more uninhabitable, and left at least an hundred more much shattered shaken and defaced.” Additionally, among the deceased were 16 people who perished in what was “probably a dinner party at the vintner Wormewell\u2019s house, including Gentlemen, Merchants, Tradesmen and diverse of very good quality, of whom diverse were slaine, and many wounded. Three members of the household also died, including his wife, an apprentice, found dead together, also a maid servant.\u201d Through our continuing work with these death records we can also see that despite this tragic incident, no further action was taken to mitigate the risk of gunpowder explosions in the city of London. I truly believe it is stories such as this, no matter how horrific, that give credence to the work of historians because we have a responsibility to remember these individuals and to not have let them died in vain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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