Holmes and Doud: Extinction of Mayflower Descendants 297 



but not enough to sensibly influence re- 

 sults. The youngest woman in this age 

 group would be 38 years of age. There 

 are. as a matter of fact, only eight 

 women in this group vmder 45 years of 

 age, and judging from the children born 

 between the ages of 38 and 45 in our 

 group, the additions to the race from 

 this source will doubtless be very few. 

 We have made separate tabulations of 

 the number of children of parents, both 

 of whom were born in the second half 

 of this interval, i. e., 1870 to 1880, and it 

 shows the startlingly low record of only 

 1 5/10 children per family. 



DECLINE IS STEADY 



The general decline in the size of 

 the families of the Mayflower descen- 

 dants is clearly indicated by the table 

 (see appendix). The first horizontal 

 column includes the number of children 

 in the families of the Mayflower descen- 

 dants to whom questionnaires were ad- 

 dressed. It shows that the decrease in 

 the size of the family has gone on stead- 

 ily with the decreasing age of the mar- 

 ried couples down to the year 1880. The 

 families of Mayflower descendants born 

 after this date naturally show a further 

 decrease, but as these families may 

 not in all cases be completed, there is 

 no means of knowing how much of this 

 decrease may be due to a further de- 

 cline of the birth rate. 



In the second horizontal column is 

 listed the number of children in the 

 families of the mothers of the persons 

 addressed, and in the third is a list of 

 the number of children in the father's 

 family. The numbers in both of these 

 columns also show a declining birth 

 rate. In general there are fewer chil- 

 dren in the family of the mother than 

 in that of the father. This is doubt- 

 less to be attributed to the fact that 

 since mothers are, as the returns show 

 in nearly every case, younger than 

 the fathers, and often several years 

 younger, they belong to rather more re- 

 cent families than those of their hus- 

 bands, and, therefore, to families in 

 which the birth rate is more reduced. 



It is well known that up to about a 

 half century ago the Mayflower descen- 

 dants were noteworthy on account of 

 their high fertility, as is indicated by 

 their very rapid increase in a few gen- 

 erations to many times their original 

 number. An examination of the pub- 

 lished genealogies of several of the 

 Mayflower families shows the frequent 

 occurrence of 8 to 10 children per fam- 

 ily ; and even larger families were by 

 no means rare. In order to secure data 

 on the fertility of this stock, before 

 the period covered by our questionnaire, 

 we have tabulated the average number 

 of the children in the genealogy of the 

 Brewster family, which has been com- 

 piled by Emma C. Brewster Jones. In 

 this extensive work the data on the 

 various families are grouped under the 

 successive generations which have ap- 

 peared since the landing of the Pil- 

 grims. It was, therefore, a small task 

 to compute the average size of the fam- 

 ilies in successive generations. As only 

 those families are listed in which at 

 least one child was born, the data is 

 not strictly comparable to ours, which 

 include sterile unions. Were the latter 

 included, the average size of the fam- 

 ilies of the Brewster descendants would 

 be somewhat reduced, although child- 

 less marriages were formerly less com- 

 mon in this stock than among present- 

 day Mayflower descendants. The data, 

 which were based on the comparison 

 of several hundred families, show 

 clearly the decline of the birth rate 

 during the last three generations. 



In our estimate of the average num- 

 ber of children per family, we have 

 included all the families in the Brewster 

 genealogy up to the eighth generation. 

 For the two subsequent generations, on 

 account of the large number of individ- 

 uals recorded, we have based our esti- 

 mate on the first two hundred families 

 of the eighth generation, and the first 

 three hundred of the ninth generation, 

 and we have considered only those 

 cases in which the ages of the parents 

 insure that the family is a completed 

 one. 



