Some Statistics of Western Australians born 1829-1859

Question

Because pretty much all Western Australians born 1829-1859 are in wikitree, this gives us an opportunity to look at characteristics of the population as a whole.

Death Location

People born in Western Australia 1840-1859 are more likely to have remained in the colony than those born 1829-1839. It was common for people born in the colony to leave as children with their parents, and Western Australia was not a good place to be a colonist in the first decade.

Barring maybe some unrecorded infant deaths, if the place of death is not currently known, it's almost certain they did not pass away in the colony.

Age at Death

Bearing in mind that ca 20% of people born in the colony don't have a death date in Wikitree, this is what the age at death profile looks like. These figures include people that didn't die in Western Australia.

Next things to look at

I intend to look at age at first marriage (men and women separately) and see if there are changes over time.

Also the proportion of people who never married.

This analysis would just be of persons who were both born and passed away in the colony, because only those are pretty much all complete.

I would also like to look at number of children born and how this changes over time, and the age range over which the children are born, but this data doesn't seem to be available using Wikitree+

Answer 1

Really cool to have such complete information about a group!

I could get data for number if children and age if parents, etc from the data dumps. How do you decide if someone was born or died in Western Australia? I'm guessing you could just search for "Western Australia" in the location fields? But sometimes you have to do something more fancy.

Edit: Here's what I've got after simple text search in the data dump:

Let me know if you're interested in the data and I could probably share a CSV with you.

Comments

Hi Shawn

That's great the data on children is in the data dump! (not that I have access to it and I think it would be too large for me to successfully deal with anyway).

I would absolutely be interested in the data and would love a csv!

I pulled the data at WIkitree+ by using the query birthlocation="western australia" and B=1829 (then B=1830 etc). That pulls up a few false positives, like "Great Western, Victoria, Australia" which I then stripped out.

My total dataset 1829-1859 is 6,400 birth records. (That's not rounded, it just happens to be a neat number). 5,090 have a death record (again, happens to be a neat number).

I could share the list of User IDs or WIkitree IDs of the extracted records if that's helpful?

Answer 2

Mark, this is wonderful that the population is all on WT and such information can be pulled from the data. Makes you wonder how we can use this idea for the small locations we each have an interest in documenting.

Comments

Yes, I think Wikitree can be a valuable database for analysing social and demographic changes. Hopefully more work will be done in this space.

Answer 3

Wonderful piece!

I am not going to quibble about variations between sexes and how it might look in different regions around the world.

I take away the ideas that many infants die before their 5th birthday and you are doing well when you pass 3 score and 10.