Death and Mortality
“To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die”
Every family history contains quiet chapters marking the end of individual journeys—moments when lives are remembered across ages, stories, and the unique circumstances of passing. Throughout family history, the reasons for death reflect both sweeping forces and deeply personal moments. Large-scale events, such as epidemics like smallpox, influenza, and cholera, or major wars and conflicts, have claimed lives en masse, altering entire generations and reshaping family trees. In contrast, more individual causes such as cancer, accidents, drug overdoses, or heart disease mark the final chapters of loved ones in unique and personal ways. By documenting both shared tragedies and intimate losses, this page offers context for those final chapters and insight into how mortality has shaped and continues to shape our ancestral stories.
Life Expectancy
This chart offers a visual exploration of life expectancy across multiple generations, grouping ancestors by their generational distance. Male (blue) and female (pink) ages at death are plotted alongside a generational median (purple), highlighting both individual variation and broader trends. Notably, there is a marked 10-year increase in median life expectancy from the 3x great-grandparent generation to the grandparent generation—a testament to improvements in health, environment, and medicine over time. Recent generations—grandparents and great-grandparents—cluster around higher life expectancies, while earlier generations show greater variability and more instances of early mortality.
Cause of Death
This pie chart breaks down the causes of death among ancestors, providing a snapshot of the major health challenges faced across generations. The data is drawn from available death certificates, ensuring accuracy in representing the cause of death for each segment.
The largest portion of the chart reflects age-related debility—natural decline in advanced age—making "old age" the most common cause of death recorded. Other significant segments include diseases of the circulatory system (such as heart disease and stroke), neoplasms (cancers), and infectious or parasitic diseases, each reflecting important historical and medical trends in family health.
Smaller portions of the chart account for deaths related to endocrine, nutritional, or metabolic diseases, respiratory diseases, and external causes such as injuries or poisoning. Notably, diseases of the nervous and digestive systems are the least frequent causes of death documented.
This distribution highlights the prevalence of certain chronic and acute conditions, the continuing impact of infections, and the universal process of aging. For more detail about each category, hover over the chart segments to reveal the specific cause and its proportion—providing interactive detail on the health outcomes that have shaped the family's story.
Super Seniors
Among the most striking aspects of this family’s story are the many octogenarians and nonagenarians who appear across both maternal and paternal lines. These ancestors—such as Kathleen Nora Grimshaw, Sarah White, Sarah Robinson, and Arthur James Grimshaw—each lived well into their nineties, offering a testament to the endurance, resilience, and perhaps the genetic strengths within these branches. The abundance of individuals who reached their eighties and beyond is notable not only for its rarity in earlier generations, but also as an indicator of stable family environments and advances in health over time. Longevity is found almost equally across both sides of the family, with a median age at death of 83 for maternal ancestors and 84 for paternal ancestors, and roughly the same number of long-lived individuals in each group. This pattern suggests that the factors supporting a long life—whether genetic inheritance, shared lifestyle, or environmental advantages—are a lasting legacy shared throughout the family tree.