Melbourne Lying-In Hospital Cohort

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Introduction

This dataset was created from the midwifery books of the Melbourne Lying-In Hospital (now the Royal Women’s Hospital) and follows the babies born between 1857 and 1900 to their death certificate. The project began at the suggestion of Professor Shaun Brennecke of the Royal Women’s Hospital with an inquiry into the relationship between birth weight and adult health. Dr Ruth Morley, newly arrived from Great Ormond Street Hospital, where her work had included the Barker hypothesis, was the project scientist and Professor Shurlee Swain brought her expertise in infant and child welfare.

The final dataset includes 8561 cradle-to-grave records and has produced publications on birth weight and cardiovascular disease, on all-age survival and is now being used as an ‘impoverished settler’ population sample for comparative analysis with the Koori Health Research Database. Professor Gita Mishra, now a professor of life course epidemiology at the School of Population Health of the University of Queensland did the initial survival analyses. Dr Len Smith (ANU) and Dr Rebecca Kippen continue to work with Ruth Morley and Janet McCalman on the dataset.

Shortname

MLHC

IDS compatible

Period

1803 - 1985

Territory

Australia

Contact information

Web Address

www.chs.unimeld.edu.au

Location

School of Population Health, University of Melbourne

Postal Address

Department of History & Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne, Victoria, 3010, Austrialia

Contact Persons

Professor Janet McCalman

janetsm@unimelb.edu.au

Scope / Status

Original goal

1) To trace from a birth certificate to a death certificate babies born as charity babies in the Melbourne Lying-In Hospital, 1857-1900, to reconstitute the life courses of an impoverished sample of the founding colonial population of Victoria, Australia.
2) Birth register records have survived for 16,272 and we have traced 8584(53%) to deaths until 1985.
3) To study relationships between birth weight, birth complications and social characteristics recorded at birth in the hospital records and birth certificate, and life span, causes of death, social destiny and family formation as recorded in the death certificate.

Sample definition

The sample was defined by its historical provenance: midwifery records of women who passed the income test for admission to a charity bed in the only lying-in hospital in the colony. Almost half were unmarried. The income test was that a woman lacked a suitable home in which to give birth and she had to be recommended for a bed by a subscriber to the hospital (it was an English-style voluntary hospital for the poor). Destitute women were often admitted as emergency cases without a ticket. The population of the hospital was poorer and less respectable than in the comparable London lying-in hospitals of the period.
Therefore the ‘sample’ is a population born to a concentration of impoverished colonial women.

Geographic area under observation

Colony, later State of Victoria, Australia, settled by Europeans 1835. Most activity in the database occurred in the City of Melbourne and within a 10km radius of the hospital.

Sources

From year	End year	Source	Explanation
1803	1856	Baptisms	These were occasionally used for births recorded in Van Diemen’s Land and Port Phillip before Vital Registration and are included in the Tasmanian and Victorian Pioneer Indexes.
1857	1900	Civil birth certificates	Civil registration began in 1838 in Tasmania and 1855 in Victoria. These recorded parents’ place of birth, marriage and occupation.
1855	1920	Civil marriage certificates	These were used for both the individuals’ parents and the individuals’ themselves. These record the occupation and address of the marrying couple, place of birth, age, parents’ names and occupation and previous marriages and offspring of the couple. Religion is recorded.
1857	1985	Civil death certificates	These record age, cause of death and up to four contributing medical conditions with duration; place of death; usual residence; current occupation; number of marriages with dates; number of offspring with the names and ages of those still living and those deceased.
		Civil population registers	Street directories.
		Nominative lists	Male and female prisoner lists; includes biometrics, photos; Industrial School registers of children committed to the care of the state; Asylum registers; War service records for World Wars I and II; biometrics, photos, character; Police Gazette reports of released prisoners and trials; biometrics, photos, clothing descriptions.
1857	1900	Midwifery registers Lying-In Hospital	Record mother’s name, age, marital status, place of birth, parity; Birth record provides length of labour (unreliable); outcome-live or stillbirth; weight, length (unreliable), complications of delivery; interventions.
		Victorian Inquests and criminal trial briefs	Depositions, evidence, autopsy reports.
		Charity Organisation Society and Ladies’ Benevolent Society records	Social work case records of individuals and families, often with multiple observations over time; includes record of income, housing, illness, crime, family problems, plus physical descriptions of individuals.
		Immigration and Convict records	Convict records include biometrics.

Observations

Units of observation

Unit of observation	Explanation	Number
Individuals	1857-1985
Married couples	Partial. 1840 – 1985. Only as parents and siblings of those individuals and those individuals when married.
Families	1840 – 1985. Only as parents and siblings of those individuals and those individuals when married.
Households	1840 – 1985. Only as parents and siblings of those individuals and those individuals when married.

Are there any related observations that are not included in the database?

Genealogies with vital records were constructed for a sample of the cohort.

How do the units of observation enter observation?

By being born alive in the Melbourne Lying-In hospital and the record of that birth having been preserved. That birth is then confirmed by a birth certificate. Some Labour ward books have been lost 1888-1895 so that around half of those births in each year were missing. However we have a continuous run of births 1857-1900 which is a representative sample of each year. We estimate that around 25,000 women were delivered in the hospital 1856-1900, and we had 16,272 complete records to work with. The hospital was occasionally closed because of infection and women were delivered under supervision in the homes of approved local midwives. Sometimes these births did not have birth weights recorded and they were not used.

How do the units of observation leave observation?

When their death certificate is traced or we acknowledge failure in tracing them. Victorian Death certificates are indexed on CD ROM, with parents’ names (when known by those present at the recording of the death), up to 1985. Some nonagenarians born after 1890 will be censored.

Dates estimated

No.

Are some entry or exit dates unknown?

Death certificates could not be traced for 47% of the cohort. Reasons for failure of record linkage include: 1) Mother gave false name to hospital (quite common); 2) Mother and child had common names (eg Ellen Ryan, Thomas Smith) and no other recorded kin to confirm identity; 3) An infant’s death was concealed or never recorded—common in the early period, increasingly less likely after mid-1880s; 4) An infant was abandoned and mother disappeared; 5) An infant or child was fostered by the state, informally adopted and took name of foster family; 6) An individual died under an alias; 7) Out-migration: significant in 1860s and 1890s; 8) Death in war service that we have failed to trace.

Can observations be linked to geographic locations?

Yes

Are the dates and locations of movements within the observation area recorded?

Partly

Are all individuals who lived in the households of sample members recorded?

Variables

Events

Type	Dated	Explanation
Birth	Yes
Marriage	Partly	Marriage certificates were not uniformly traced as Indexes give year and death certificates give age of marriage as remembered by the individual’s kin. These are often discrepant and we have read those discrepancies as highly significant of the quality of oral transfer of family history over time.
Death	Yes
Migration	Yes	The ship and passenger lists of both unassisted and assisted immigrants.
Transportation	Yes	For those with convict parents or grandparents.

Coding / Reference systems

Occupational titles: UK SES historically specified to account for casual and regular employment and labour market change over time.

Locations (including geo-referenced systems): Historically specific SES coding derived from Charles Booth’s poverty maps of London, 1890s.

Kinship relations

Recording

In Births, Marriages and Deaths, parents’ names are given, with occupations in B and M. In Births, Marriages, parents’ names and occupations. In Deaths, parents’ names (if known), marriages, age of marriage, status of spouse, ages and first names of children, number of children deceased, if multiple marriages—in which marriage children were born. This information is supplied by witnesses to the registration at the death, so that those who die disconnected from kin leave no kinship record.

Depth of information

Three generations from the individual’s BDM, but more has been reconstituted genealogically by further linkage.

Publications

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European Historical Population Samples Network

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