This small, cheap notebook, measuring just 101x53mm, is a touching and affecting testament to late nineteenth century infant mortality.
Probably started some time in the mid 1890s by my great grandmother, Maud Minhinnett, it records the birth and (often) death dates of 13 of her 18 children.
Born Maud Bentley in 1870 in Devonport, she married William Minhinnett in Plymouth Register Office when she was eighteen and lived poor and pregnant for a large part of the next twenty years.
Only ten of her children were recorded at the General Register Office; the others were remembered by her up to the end of her long life. This tiny book was one of the few objects she still kept at her death in 1964.
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