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I have met a hitch in trying to find twin sisters of a grandmother who died at birth.I have records of one who was 4 days old when she died which confirms she was a twin. There is no record of the other which bears out that she may have been stillborn.
The burial record which adds up in most respects shows they were buried some 7 weeks after death.
Why would this have happened? We can think of 3 possibilities
1.The weather was awful (birth in February and burial in April)
2.the mother was very ill following the birth and refused to allow the burial to go ahead until she could be present.
3. We have the wrong set of twins in the burial records.

If the dates are correct then what would have happened to the bodies of the little girls pending burial?

Would the chapel records give information which is not contained in the records required by law? We are particularly keen to find out the name of the stillborn.
Thanks

At a guess the possiblity of weather would get my vote-- frozen ground,,,,depending on the era of course all done by hand.....

could the father have been away?


If there was a stillborn baby then,,,,they would not have been registered in birth,nor a death record.,so went unnamed and just placed with her twin.

Yes I totally agree about the weather- this is in Blaenau Ffestiniog in Snowdonia !
The father wasn't away- he registered the birth and death of the little girl born alive.
I also agree about the stillbirth but having found out that the one born alive was named I just can't imagine that they would not have named the stillborn sister too.

From google ....

1923 (February):
One of the WETTEST Februarys across England & Wales

No mention of severe cold.

Maybe the children were buried in a common grave at the time then RE-buried in April, perhaps when the family could afford it.

An average day in Blaenau Ffestiniog is cold- even in summer!
The children are buried in the grave of an aunt and uncle of their father- she having only died a few months before. There is no mention of them on the grave and we wouldn't have found them but for the person in the archives office.
However they have only been identified by being twins- not by name or name of parents. To some extent then we are going on the basis that it is unlikely that there would have been another set of twins being buried within two months and in a grave which had a family connection.
What has caused us to ponder is that a friend of the grandmother(who was not even born in 1923) is fairly certain that the family never lived at the address from which the funeral took place- even though it is near to the cemetary and near the address of the aunt in whose grave they are buried.
Searching newspaper reports last night turned up an interesting point. The address for the funeral came up as being the home of someone who was killed in Gaza in 1917. The father of the twins had been wounded in Gaza in 1917 and would have inevitably known the person killed.

Being brutally honest I would think that in 1923 it would be unlikely that there would have been a 7 week delay between death and burial. I think it most likely that the burial is not of who you think it might be. The use of an open or recently open grave for the burial of a stillborn or young infant unrelated to the other incumbent was certainly not unknown.

As Kay has said in 1923 the birth of a stillborn would not have been required to be registered. Although reburial is a possibility that surely would have required Home Office permission to exhume the bodies from their original burial site.

I think that in 1923 it was very unlikely that a stillborn child would be named. Even if it was given a name there would be nowhere where the name was recorded because it wouldn't have a birth or death certificate and even if buried I don't think a name would be recorded. It's an unpleasant and brutal fact that a lot of stillborn children were "disposed of" be the person attending the birth.

Kath. x

I do no from my family that my mothers father could not afford to pay for the death registration and funeral of her brother who died age 6 and so the burial took place at a later date after he was granted relief from i think the parish?

Roy

That the bodies would be added to a recently opened grave makes sense. I still can't work out though where they would have been and how they would have been kept in the meantime. I wonder what they did in the case of Porkie Pie's ancestor?
I also see that exhuming would require someone's consent-and wouldn't that increase the cost anyway?
The reason we are searching for a name is purely on a personal level. I can see that one stillborn child may be buried or disposed of without a name.However this was a twin and her twin did have a name. From a mother's point of view it would be the only thing you could ever do for a stillborn and I just can't see a family burying two in the same grave- one with a name and one without..
The reason I asked about chapel records is that we know there was a minister present at the burial. The sort of community would have prayed for the family in their services and would probably have announced the burial in the service also. I wondered whether chapels kept a "diary "of what happened in the service every week.
Another point that occurs to me- do funeral directors keep records? If the company is still in existence they may know something.
Does anyone know when coffins became necessary? Presumably stillborns didn't need them. Would a 4 day old child have required one?

In 1923, stillborns were not regarded in the same way as they are nowadays, and would not be named.

Stillborns were unlikely even to be buried.

Just a point.

In your opening post you state " I have records of one who was 4 days old when she died which confirms she was a twin. There is no record of the other which bears out that she may have been stillborn."

Does that mean that you have a copy of the birth certificate of the infant who died aged 4 days old and that states his/her birth was as a twin? I have very limited experience in such matters but since a stillborn death would not be registered at that time it seems strange that its sibling would have the fact that it was a twin recorded on its birth certificate.

The remains of a stillborn were often buried in the coffin of someone totally unrelated who just happened to be awaiting internment at that time. I would think it most unlikely that its remains would remain unburied for a period of 7 weeks.

Yes the death certificate states she was a twin in the "Cause of death" column
1. Twin
2. Premature birth.

I also came across this last week in a totally different context on the net . I'll try and find what it was I saw.

You refer to the death cert - have you got the birth cert?

And you must realise that the stillborn child would not have had a name by which you could identify it.

The parents may have 'named' it in their minds, but that's as far as it would go.

There simply wasn't the same sentimentality about infant mortality in those days as there is now - it was an accepted part of life...........brutal though that may seem to us.

Found it. www.dixons.clara.co.uk/Certificates/births.

Look in the paragraph "Column 1 Date + Place of Birth."

The birth certificate I have doesn't actually show the twin information- just the death certificate.

Is the place of death the same as the place of birth?

What were the respective dates....birth and death?

When was each event registered - and by whom?

Yes born and died in the home of the maternal grandmother which is named.
Born 23rd February 1923, died 27th February 1923
Both birth and death registered 28th February 1923 by the father.

As Reggie has said infant mortality was much more common back in those days and even then it was greatly reduced from what it had been only a few years earlier. If my research is accurate the deaths of at least 9 children under 1 year old were recorded in that quarter in that area.

Would I be correct in guessing that the unfortunate infant was named Laura Roberts?

No she was Megan Jones

Just to clarify....

You have a cemetery / graveyard record that refers to the burial of Megan?..... Do you have a date , that is the same for both burials?

A burial service record from the chapel, if a different register might contain information.

I don't agree that stillborns are likely to have not been buried.
I have records of stillborn burials with plot numbers from 1879.

Could the birth of the 2nd twin have been delayed enough for it to have been born in the next quarter?.... Unlikely, but not impossible.

Gwyn