Rough draft
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The Michigan line of the Braintree Frenches would "semi-exterminate" with the Civil War. (That War's marrying generation was the first not to replace itself with a "large-enough" next generation.)
That War marked two changes. First, for every death, some other soldier had disabilities, emotional problems (PTSD) or physical difficulties, limiting the ability to earn an income and/or to marry. Even for survivors, there were three-to-four years of wartime when no child-bearing occurred, omitting two or three children who might otherwise have been born.
Secondly, post-war, more young adults moved to large cities. Machines let farmers farm more land with less labor. Fewer hands needed? More feet went to the city. Railroads soon went coast-to-coast. Those young and unmarried migrated to more distant cities, larger ones. With urban housing costly, more education needed for more of the urban jobs, marriages happened at later ages. The old support systems? Relatives once lived next-door. Aunties and cousins were no longer nearby to offer playmates and otherwise help with childcare.
EXAMPLE. Consider Ransom French (b. 1811 in Ohio, assumed grandson of Abiathar French the Jr.). He was a farmer and foundry-owner in Mich., father to six.
For every five children, there need to be 11 grandchildren, demographers say, for a population not to shrink. Ransom French and wife Rebecca Farley thus needed about 13 grandchildren across their six children. Hurting the odds, three children had none.
Son Ebenezer made captain in the Civil War. Serious injuries in two key battles left him war-surviving, yet war-damaged. Afterward, Ebenezer worked as a printer, as he had done pre-War in Michigan, but went to San Jose, California. He would die by 40, no wife, no children. His brother Edwin went pre-War with uncles to California, perhaps after his father Ransom's death (1853), then "never returned". When last seen, he was single, living in a house of men employed in mining. That sighting was in a census record in 1870, in what is now a ghost town in Nevada. His little sister, Olive, a toddler at her father Ransom's death, died at eleven.
Would the other three siblings make-up for the three having zero? Ebenezer's two other sisters, Climena and Mary Eliza, went also to the then cowboy-wild part of California, locating below San Francisco Bay, westish of San Jose. Both married. Only two of the five children born to the sisters would reproduce.
Climena's life stopped at 40, an age when her female ancestors were still having children. Of Climena's three, one died in infancy. Her son Edwin "bached it" (a bachelor living with his long-lived father in multiple censuses). Only Climena's daughter, Grace Shearer Harvey, reproduced.
Mary Eliza's child-bearing took a pause first at the death of first husband (Melville Byerly, owner of the Salinas Index, which had inspired some of John Steinbeck's writing for his epic "East of Eden<.I>. We've found no war record, too sick to go?) He died while she was well under 30; they had only a son. She soon married again, a much older man, Louis Nelson Williams, born S.C., aka Lewis N. Williams. Was he the "ox teamster" working in distant lumber camps as Nelson Williams? He fathered her second son, but no more. Can one get pregnant by a man never home? He disappeared. He died undetected, deserted her, take your pick, as all those things happened in early California. (San Jose had been labeled as "Murder Town" only a decade or two earlier.) The wreck of a ship leaving a lumber camp took lives, one man vaguely listed, only as Nelson. For the 1880 Census, Mary E. was listed as married, but alone with two young boys. Only one, Edwin Williams, had children.
That left Ransom's youngest son, A. O. (Alfred/Alford Oren French), back in Mich., to bear more fruit for Rebecca and Ransom. Could he raise the five grandchildren counted so far, to the recommended 13. Did he have eight? He went to war, afterward returned to farm. The lakeside "micro-climate" was previously perfect for raising peaches. Yet, he lost that first farm. "The yellows", a peach blight, destroyed his orchards. Into retailing for awhile (off to the city!), he was able to resurrect later as a farmer, apparently by farming his mother-in-law's land in Berrien County. Yet, farming there would not bring profits as often as before. Southern Michigan no longer had nearby Chicago as a captive market, with local farmers charging a premium for extra-fresh produce pre-War, shipped by steamboat. Refrigerated rail cars now could get produce from New York to Chicago while still fresh, increasing supply, so prices fell.
Did he have eight? No. A.O. had three, all boys. One, a namesake for A.O.'s father, the first Ransom French, would die by 20, of a fever (meningitis? encephalitis?). Only two sons had children, just a few. One son's two sons moved to Detroit, hard to track. Son George Alfred went off to LA in California, then had a son, who had a son, who had a son, trackable due to using Oren/Orin/Orrin as a middle name, ending up by the Oregon border.
HELLO CITY, GOOD-BYE FARM. How did the French name survive earlier war eras? Lots of sons per family. What else mattered? Neighbors keeping livestock alive (quarantines of the ill) and reproducing (calendar watching) also kept alive their large families.
Learning lessons from neighbors' herding, of course, meant living in a rural era. We are a nation of city people now. Coloring states red and blue to depict politics, we don't see that reality. Better maps show big, growing circles, each circle proportionate to the size of some metropolis. Not all states have such a mega-circle, with rural areas and small towns continuing to de-populate as we speak. (Fewer locally owned stores and factories generate jobs, swallowed up by large companies whose CEOs prefer to operate in big places. The rural young leave to go where those companies might be. Once in mega-cities, they have fewer children as housing is more expensive, and good jobs can come and go.
By Julia Brown, Austin, TX, copyright Aug., 2015, rev. 2016. Permission granted to Findagrave to use at this page.
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