Understanding Causes of Death in Vital Records

Example of an unclear cause of death in the Vermont Vital Records.

One aspect of genealogical research and putting together stories about family history is understanding the “extras” in vital records. The name, date, place — those are the core tidbits of information. But the extras, like how someone died, they help tell the story.

The problem with causes of death, though, is that medicine and science have changed over time and what we understand about disease today isn’t what our ancestors knew.

Take, for example, lung fever. This isn’t an actual condition. It was an umbrella term for a number of conditions we differentiate today but that they didn’t understand the etiology of or have a term for prior to the mid-20th century. Lung fever is often simply considered to be code for pneumonia, but it comprised any lower respiratory infection that was accompanied by a fever. It could have been COPD (fever can occur during a flare-up), bacterial pneumonia (secondary to influenza or a primary infection with Strep), inhaled fungal spores, or a viral pneumonia. Another term used for this, especially if there was rib pain, was pleurisy.

Although germ theory — the idea that a pathogen infects a person, causing disease — dates back to the 1700s, we didn’t have a way to actually test for these disease-causing agents until Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur developed their bacterial culture methods…