26 October 2011

Birth anomalies in England and Wales


Winding up the investigation of vital statistics from FreeBMD, for England and Wales, the graph shows annual birth registrations.

Births, already in decline in the first years of the 20th century, dropped through the years of WW1 bottoming out at one-third of the level at the start of the century in 1918.  A mini baby boom is evident in 1920, the highest number of births in a single year in the record. The decline takes hold again until 1933.

Don't get taken in my the erratic variations during WW2. 1939 - 40, 1943 - 45 and 1949 all have large numbers of entries not yet in the FreeBMD database.
at

3 comments:

  1. Peter Adams04 December, 2011 07:33

    I'm very interested in the data on births and death registrations in the UK since the 1830s but have been unable to find a page which provides me with the data. Any chance you have a link or document which contains the year-by-year births and deaths? it would be much appreciated!

    ReplyDelete
  2. JDR04 December, 2011 08:39

    The immediate source that comes to mind, undoubtedly not the best, is the database statistics for FreeBMD at http://freebmd.org.uk/cgi/EntryCounts.pl

    Expect a post with a better source soon.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Peter Adams04 December, 2011 15:37

    thank you very much for the link! it's exactly what I've been looking for.

    my parents have been tracing back family trees, and I've had a budding interest in demographics, so I was keen to see just what the country looked like, demographically when my great-grandparents were born.

    very surprised by the sharp drops in births. strange to see how the structure changed, as England and Wales underwent demographic transition. thanks again! :)

    ReplyDelete