Brooke Thompson & “Little Losses: An Analysis of Child Mortality and Grief in Nineteenth-Century Tallahassee”

Thu, 06/27/24
Brooke Thompson

Brooke Thompson, a senior at Florida State University, double-majored in Creative Writing and History this spring. She chose this combination of subjects to broaden her education and career options.  She added History to her Creative Writing major because of some of the classes she had taken as well as the passion her history professors had for their subjects. Her ultimate goal is to be a fiction novelist.

Every FSU History Major gets to take the senior seminar, an in-depth research class. In fall 2023, Thompson participated in Dr. Kathleen Conti’s senior seminar, “American Buildings and Landscapes.” She selected this course because of her interest in architecture and American history. Thompson’s first idea had been to research colonial residential housing in New England or the history of skyscrapers in cities such as Chicago. However, after beginning the course, Thompson was inspired to research child burial practices at the Old City Cemetery in Tallahassee, Florida.

What does the senior seminar course entail?

My senior seminar involved meeting for a three-hour session once a week. The class had two focuses. In one, we were usually asked to familiarize ourselves with a podcast episode and two or three scholarly essays about that week’s particular topic, then spent the first half of class discussing them. We would then examine the materials for their own merits and for how they could help us in our own research. During the second half of class, we were forming—and eventually fine-tuning—our own specific research topics. There were deadlines throughout the semester for each successive piece of the larger project: the topic and research question, a proposal with potentially relevant primary and secondary sources, a 10-minute oral presentation, annotated bibliography, first pages, and final draft. We participated in peer review multiple times throughout this process.

What topic did you work on?

My topic was initially “Tallahassee burial practices during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” That turned into a focus on child burial practices at Old City Cemetery, so the thesis I ended up with was: “Child mortality remained prevalent throughout the nineteenth century because of the innate conditions of the environment, a pervasive lack of medical care for children, and continued racial discrimination. After their children had died, families of the deceased attempted to reconcile with these deaths through religion, evinced most often by quotes of Christian scripture and Christian motifs on the grave markers erected in their honor.”

How and why did you decide on this topic?

I picked this topic because I wanted to research something local and utilize local resources to do so. I also find cemeteries beautiful and fascinating. With this topic, I had a reason to visit the State Archives of Florida and Old City Cemetery and engage with them in a professional, academic manner. Dr. Conti emphasized the value of using archives for primary source research, so I knew it was something I wanted to try my hand at.

What sort of sources did you use for your paper?

Some of the primary sources I used:

  1. Physical remains of headstones at Old City Cemetery
  2. United States Census records from 1850 to 1880; especially Mortality Schedules from Leon County. I loved going through the mortality schedules. A large portion of my research is focused on analyzing the recorded causes of death to determine what nineteenth-century residents might have feared or what their daily habits were.
  3. Newspaper articles from that time period, such as excerpts describing outbreaks of plague in publications like The Weekly Floridian and The Florida Sentinel
  4. A book called A View of West Florida (1827) by John Lee Williams. He was assigned the job of surveying West Florida/the area of modern-day Tallahassee and recorded his initial observations in the book.

How did you fare during the writing process?

The biggest struggle I faced throughout the entire writing process was managing my expectations. I had to shrink the scale of my research over and over to make it something that was actually achievable within a class semester.

This is what I wrote in my original proposal: “I will be comparing city-owned cemeteries, church-owned cemeteries, and private burial grounds to examine how inhabitants of Tallahassee throughout this time period mourned and commemorated their dead, and what these practices indicated about the overarching beliefs and customs of their everyday lives.”

In the end, I had reduced my scope to one specific cemetery (Old City Cemetery) and even further still to one demographic of the cemetery—children (aged under 18).

What was the most surprising thing you learned during your research?

One thing I learned was that pediatric medicine didn’t come into popular practice until the twentieth century. In mostly rural areas of the south, like Tallahassee, where medicine was administered by traveling physicians more often than doctors in hospitals, methods for treating children were often unsuccessful. They would be prescribed the same dosages as adults—which their bodies were not equipped to handle—or neglected altogether because physicians didn’t know what to do with them. For example, when a father accidentally gave his five-year old child a dose of morphine instead of quinine – a popular medicine for fever, the child was dead within a few hours.

[One particularly sad accident is the story of Captain A.H. McGuire’s child. He gave the five-year-old a dose of morphine, mistaking it for quinine—a popular medicine for fever—and four hours later the child died.]

Do you have any advice that you wish your past self had known going in?

Advice I would give my past self: Go to the archives more than you did!

I visited three times total, and I loved the information I encountered there. If I set aside more time for it, I’m sure I would’ve found more relevant resources to add to my research. The people who work there are happy to help you find what you’re looking for, and you need more than a few hours a day to give each artifact the attention it deserves.

Check out Leon County library too! They’ve got a genealogy section that might’ve been helpful for finding out more specific details about the children I studied—so much about them remained a mystery to me.