Mortality transition among the wends of Serbin, Texas, 1854–1884: Changes in pattern of death from parochial records

Abstract

Investigating cause of death is important in the study of mortality. Most studies, however, deal with aggregate national samples and rely on civil death certificates filled out by physicians. Little or no research has been done using parochial burial registers for individual-level cause of death. This article investigates causes of death between 1854 and 1884 among the Wends of Serbin, Texas, a nineteenth-century European immigrant community. The goal is: (1) to show that data pertaining to individual cause of death extracted from parochial records can contribute to knowledge about historical mortality patterns at the community level, (2) to determine if an epidemiological transition occurred in this population, and (3) to identify changes in disease patterns over time. Changes in the pattern of disease for the entire population as well as for the subpopulation under one year of age are analyzed.