THORNBER ARCHIVE: GENERAL REGISTRATION IN ENGLAND

Page 3: Thornber Deaths from July 1837 to September 1851

General Registration began in England in July 1837. The following references to Thornber deaths have been abstracted from the GRO index. It is important to note that at this time up to half of all children died before the age of 20 depending on the location. Infant mortality rates were highest in Manchester, Salford and Liverpool, followed closely by the other south Lancashire towns. Across the whole of England about 17% of children died before reaching the age of one but in the slum districts of Manchester the numbers were twice that.

The table below shows that the vast majority of Thornber death registrations in the 1830s and 1840s were in only a few Registration Districts: Blackburn and Burnley in Lancashire; Clitheroe which covered parts of Lancashire and nearby villages in Yorkshire; Settle and Skipton in West Yorkshire. Most of the people dying in this period had only one Christian name and there are large numbers of males with the names Henry, James, John, Richard, Thomas and William and large numbers of females called Alice, Ann, Betty, Elizabeth, Isabella, Margaret, Mary and Sarah. Some but not all variants of Thornber have been included in the table below. In particular those variants in the main Thornber districts have been included. The surname is Thornber except where otherwise stated in brackets. Where an entry can be correlated with a known burial record, the details are shown.

I am very grateful to Ian Roberts for providing me with the entries from the March quarter of 1854 to June 1862.

Entries are shown for 1900 and 1901 at the end of the table.

Illegible letters given by asterisks. Tables coloured as follows: births - green; marriages - pink, deaths - grey.

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