Bills of Mortality, 1810-1849, City of Boston with an Essay on the Vital Statistics of Boston from 1810 to 1841...
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Memorials of the Descendants of William Shattuck, the Progenitor of the Families in America That Have Borne his Name; Including an Introduction, and an Appendix Containing Collateral Information
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Lemuel Shattuck was an American statistician and genealogist. He was the chairman of the commission to make the first sanitary survey of Massachusetts, and its Report.
Background
He was born on October 15, 1793 in Ashby, Massachussets, United States, and brought up in or near New Ipswich, New Hampshire. He was the son of John and Betsy (Miles) Shattuck and descendant of William Shattuck who died in Watertown, Massachussets, in 1672.
Education
He supplemented brief formal schooling at Appleton Academy by private study.
Career
He taught school at Troy and Albany, New York, and later in Detroit, where he organized the first Sunday school in Michigan. At the age of thirty, he became a merchant at Concord, Massachussets, in partnership with his brother Daniel.
As a member of the school committee he reorganized the schools of Concord, introducing annual school reports, the first of which he presented and published. This practice, required by law throughout the state as a result of his suggestion as a member of the legislature in 1838, did much to improve the school system.
About 1834 Shattuck removed to Cambridge and some two years later, to Boston, where he became a publisher and bookseller. At the age of forty-six he retired to devote the rest of his life to public service.
His first publications, appearing in a newspaper, were papers on the two hundred years of Concord's history. Finding that they kindled local interest, he added to them and in 1835 published A History of the Town of Concord, a great improvement upon preceding town histories.
In studying local genealogy he found that the Concord records of births, marriages, and deaths had been greatly neglected; accordingly he helped to persuade the Massachusetts Medical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to propose a more effective system of registering births, marriages, and deaths, and was thus instrumental in securing the passage in 1842 of a law requiring such registration, passed in 1842. Shattuck furnished material for the early registration reports and alone prepared the fourth report, on a novel plan.
As a member of the legislature in 1849 he became chairman of a special committee on registration which through its report brought about a thorough revision of the state's registration laws. To utilize the statistics of births, marriages, and deaths as Shattuck desired to do, further information about various classes of the population was necessary. Accordingly, he persuaded the Boston Common Council, of which he had been an active member in 1837-41, to take a census of that city in 1845, and was chosen by the committee to execute the project. For the first time in the United States the record included the name and description of every person enumerated among other characteristics specifying the birth place of each, and thus distinguishing the native from the foreign population.
The federal census of 1840 had been widely and justly criticized; when it was time for the federal census of 1850, Shattuck was called to Washington for consultation. He persuaded those who were organizing it to introduce many improvements based on his Boston experience, and as a result that census marked a longer advance over its predecessor than has been made at any other date. He became chairman in 1849 of the commission to make a sanitary survey of Massachusetts, and its Report (1850), written entirely by him.
Of this same report, which led to the creation twenty years later of the Massachusetts State Board of Health, another writer said in 1917, "One is amazed, first, at the far-sightedness of Shattuck, and, second, at the way in which his ideal slowly fulfilled itself; there is hardly one of his fifty recommendations which has not in one way or another been carried out in Massachusetts, and there is hardly a public health measure put into practice which was not anticipated by Shattuck, save only those relating to bacteriology - a science then unborn".
In 1855 he published Memorials of the Descendants of William Shattuck, a genealogy of his own family. He died in 1859 in Boston, Massachusetts.
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Personality
Shattuck was somewhat above the medium height, precise in dress, slightly pompous in manner.
Quotes from others about the person
Dr. Henry I. Bowditch said of it long afterwards, "Shattuck as a layman, did more towards bringing Massachusetts to its present status than all the efforts made by the Massachusetts Medical Society in its corporate capacity or by members".
Connections
He married Clarissa Baxter of Boston, December 1, 1825, and they had five daughters, of whom three survived him.