My Ancestors

In May 1858 the Hull Daily News reported:

Last Saturday, a sad accident occurred on the south side of the Queen’s Dock. It seems that a boy, seven years of age, named Peter William Clarke, son of a seaman [George Osbourne CLARK], who is at present, we understand, on a Greenland voyage, in the ‘Chase’, was playing with some other boys upon some bales of cotton on the south side of the above dock, when one of the bales fell upon his head, and fearfully crushed the left side of it. He was taken to the Dispensary, but no surgeon was in attendance, he was removed to the shop of Mr Foster, druggist, Whitefriargate; but life was then extinct, and the body was taken to the Parliament Street police-station. Subsequently, Mr Munroe, the police surgeon, examined the body, and, judging from the crushed appearance of the head, he expressed the opinion that death had been instantaneous. The body was afterwards removed to Dryden’s Entry, Salthouse Lane, where the deceased’s parents reside. At the inquest on Monday a verdict of ‘Accidental Death’ was returned.

Peter was born in 1850 and almost certainly named after his cousin Peter William NELSON who had died in 1849 at the age of eleven from Asiatic cholera. The 1849 Hull epidemic claimed around 2.5% of Hull’s population. Once it struck the disease’s progress was rapid – Peter’s death certificate records that he had the disease for twenty-two hours.

Infant deaths were common at the time. Both Peter Williams were grandsons of my 3 x great grandparents William Taylor CLARK (1795-1869) and Ann CLARK (nee OSBOURN) (c1787-1877).

In total William and Ann had fourteen grandchildren, four of whom died in infancy. The other two children who died were Jeremiah William CLARK who died in 1847 at the age of twenty-two months having suffered from pneumonia for eight days, and William Thomas Taylor CLARK who died in 1856 at the age of four from acute hydrocephalous.

The other ten grandchildren all survived to adulthood. So it transpires that my 3 x great grandfather had fourteen grandchildren, only four of whom had William as one of their names, and those four were the four who died. Odd. How unlikely was this? Well that depends critically on the question you’re actually asking … but if we take it as a given that William Taylor CLARK did have fourteen grandchildren and that exactly four of them were going to die, then the chances it would be a given four are 4/14 x 3/13 x 2/12 x 1/11 = 0.1% or one in a thousand.

But then again the likelihood of last week’s lottery numbers coming up were 6/49 x 5/48 x 4/47 x 3/46 x 2/45 x 1/44 = around one in fourteen million … but they still came up!

I’m just particularly thankful my great grandfather was one of the ten who made it to adulthood, otherwise you might not be reading this story. Philosophical stuff all this chance and probability!

Bibliography

1. Hull Daily News, 29 May 1858, 7a
2. Cooper, Henry. “On the Cholera Mortality in Hull during the Epidemic of 1849.” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 16, no. 4 (1853): 347–51. https://doi.org/10.2307/2338134