March 2016 - Where were the Indefatigable Boys From?

Post date: Mar 01, 2016 5:14:29 PM

The following gif shows the last place of residence for children entering the Indefatigable training ship. The places of residence start out being mostly in Liverpool and Lancashire but quickly expand to take on a much wider range of the country. London and the Southeast feature quite prominently, and after the ship moved to Northern Wales during World War II, there were a lot more children joining from there.

The map below shows the birthplaces of all children enrolled in the Indefatigable rather than their place of residence. Again we see that many of the children were born in Lancashire and neighbouring Cheshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire with an additional cluster in North Wales and the Southeast.

We plan to use this geospatial information in two main ways. First, we can control for county of birth or residence when studying the children’s growth over time so that the geographical composition of children in any particular decade does not skew our results. Second, we have begun to painstakingly link the counties and even registration districts (a smaller geographical unit) of birth and residence to information about infant and child mortality in each unit. This will help us understand whether the disease environment in the child’s place of birth influenced their growth.

In the end we are actually quite pleased with this spatial distribution. The cursory analysis done before the grant and the guidance of archivists suggested that the vast majority of children on the Indefatigable came from Liverpool. This was clearly not the case.

Eric Schneider and Pei Gao (who made all of the maps)