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Religion: love and death

The records of children's own writing tend to be very religious. Dorothy Plumpton, writing about 1600 to beg her father to allow her to return home, ends, 'And I beseech you to send me a fine hatt and some good cloth to make me some kevercheffes. And thus I beseech Jesu to have you in his blessed keeping to his pleasure and your harts desire and comforth.' Cotton Mather's diary records how 13 of his 15 children died. Just after his wife and two daughters had died of measles, 'My lovely Jerusha expired.
The records of children's own writing tend to be very religious. Dorothy Plumpton, writing about 1600 to beg her father to allow her to return home, ends, 'And I beseech you to send me a fine hatt and some good cloth to make me some kevercheffes. And thus I beseech Jesu to have you in his blessed keeping to his pleasure and your harts desire and comforth.'

Cotton Mather's diary records how 13 of his 15 children died. Just after his wife and two daughters had died of measles, 'My lovely Jerusha expired.

She was two years and about seven months old... I begg'd, I begg'd, that such a bitter Cup, and the Death of that lovely child might pass from me...

Just before she died, she asked me to pray with her (and) the Minute she died, she said, That she would go to Jesus Christ.'

Until around the mid- to late 1700s, dominant Puritan ideas that babies were born full of original sin led adults to punish children harshly, to beat out the devil and break the child's will in order to save their soul.

Yet, as the stories of Jerusha and many other children show, severe Puritan parents could also love their children deeply.

Children were often warned that they might die and go to hell, and they saw corpses laid out at home, or hanging up after execution, as a dire warning.

Churchyards were children's playgrounds. Talk of death was realistic, when so many children and parents died young.