Recently there was discussion of the effect of plagues and disease which ran unchecked. To these, one could add the wars which produced similar results. Most of these deaths were the result of starvation and disease, not bullets. Events in the Seventeenth Century in Europe were dominated by the Thirty Years’ War. The ramifications of this were still felt even one hundred years later.
I did a little study of what happened in the village of Mundelsheim, which is about seven miles to the east of Gross Sachsenheim, where the family of George Moyer originated. Or, it is about half way between Heilbronn and Stuttgart. Today it is in Württemberg. The numbers that I am using come from one of the later pastors who counted the deaths and births for each year which he tabulated in the front of the Church Book. Births in the Church Book started in 1603, and death entries started in 1633.
From 1620 to 1629, the average number of births per year was almost 30. From 1640 to 1649, the number of births was a little more than 14 per year. Using the reasonable assumption that the number of births is proportional to the size of the population, we see the population had been cut in half in the 1630s. This was a very bad decade for the people in Mundelsheim. That it was very bad is shown by the number of births and the number of deaths. For the two years, 1638 and 1639, the numbers of births that were recorded were zero. If you are thinking that the population had moved away, the number of deaths in these years in the Mundelsheim Church Book would indicate otherwise.
The year of maximum births had been in 1606, when 40 were recorded, but, of course, the average is less than this. In a stable population, the number of births and deaths are equal. In 1635, the number of deaths is 320, which is ten times the number of births per year in the 1620s decade.
The reduction in population from the early part of the century was not overcome even by 1680, even though, from 1640 to 1680, the number of births exceeded the number deaths. Rebuilding of the population came from two sources, internal and external. As the number of births exceeded the number of deaths there would be a growth. From external sources an increase would occur as a net immigration from other areas. The rulers, in general, sought immigrants to rebuild. In some regions, for example The Kraichgau, the rebuilding of the population went so far by the Eighteenth Century that there were more people than the land could support. This was one of the reasons that emigration occurred to other regions of Europe and to America.
(24 Nov 03)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.