Who Do You Think You Are Magazine Forum

[calliefrance]

Could anyone enlighten me as to what it meant if you died of TEETH. I have the parish burial records for Sculcoates in Hull for 1792 - 1812 and alot of people died (mainly children) of teeth.

[MoVidger]

“Teeth” usually meant children who died while their deciduous or ‘milk’ teeth were erupting, who were generally aged between 6 and 18 months, with a median age of 1 year. Teeth was more widely in use as a cause of death descriptor, at least until the early nineteenth century. Obviously it's not helpful in suggesting what the true cause of death might have been. It's likely that diarrhoeal disease, and perhaps febrile infections giving rise to convulsions, were the underlying causes of death for those dying of "teeth".

[SarahU]

On the death certificate of a child of one of my ancestors, the cause of death is noted as “teething” - at the time, l thought they just didn’t know the cause of death except the child was going through the crying and pain of the teething stage? Something we now know is quite normal and we have remedies to help alleviate. Thanks for posting this!

[peter kent]

Teething often coincided with weaning and weaning introduced a further possible source of infection.