These days if we want to know the Causes of Death we have only to read the Death Certificates for the individuals concerned, but certificates were only introduced in England and Wales when the system of Civil Registration of Births, Marriages and Deaths was created in mid-1837. Before that we must rely on the diligence of individual clergymen responsible for administering at a funeral when it came to them making an appropriate entry in their Burial Registers.

However, there was no requirement in church or civil law for the cause of death to be recorded, and so there are many entries in many Burial Registers that give us no clue as to the cause of that individual’s demise.

We can also never be sure with deaths before 1837 whether a doctor had been present at the death, and therefore able to make a specific judgment of the cause. With the majority of the England and Wales Lovelock and Loveluck community being engaged in agricultural pursuits there would have been precious little, if any, spare money to pay a doctor's fees. Instead there would have been a reliance on folk remedies for all sorts of ailments. Any infliction that, in today's medical opinions, would require surgery was either somehow done without or considered with a good deal of apprehension, perhaps even fear, in the days before scrupulous cleanliness, disinfection and totally effective anaesthetics. Just consider the possible consequences of the actions of the 16th Century country surgeon pictured here!

Naturally many Lovelock or Loveluck deaths, in common with the rest of the population, will have been due to the degradations of advancing years, several of the causes of which were generally understood and their symptoms easily recognised. As a for instance we have the case of Elizabeth Lovelock from the Wootton Rivers Tree who died on 18 September 1872; whoever Certified the death gave as the cause 'Old Age Dropsy', a condition which would have been plainly evident (Dropsy being the retention of fluid in the body's tissues). Often, though, the person reporting the death and the Registrar seem to have colluded in arriving at a vaguer form of words which satisfied the need to complete a Certificate. A case in point is that of James Lovelock who died on 27 August 1858 at the age of 88: Cause of Death is recorded as 'Decay of Nature Certified’, although by whom certified is not stated.

There would also have been Lovelocks and Lovelucks amongst the legions of those who succumbed to the commoner killers – Smallpox, Tuberculosis, Typhoid and Cholera amongst them – but whose burial details omit any such mention.

So far as our accumulated data is concerned we know of only three Lovelocks who were felled by Smallpox, and one other who might have been. The ‘might have been’ was Robert Lovelock who, when buried at St James’s in Clerkenwell on 19 July 1760, was ‘of the Smallpox hospital’. He may of course have been a member of staff who died from something other than Smallpox. The definite cases we know of were Ann Lovelock who was buried on 9 Jun 1779 in Basingstoke in Hampshire, Sarah Lovelock who, at the age of only 13 months, was buried at St Anne’s in Soho, London on 27 October 1802, and George Lovelock from the Kintbury Tree who died on 2 May 1868 in Lambeth, Surrey.

The incumbent at St Anne’s around the time Sarah died was one of those diligent clergymen mentioned above who through his Register also provides us with the following:
    Amey Lovelock aged 5 died of a Fever and was buried on 16 September 1802
    David Lovelock aged 4 died of 'Decline' and was buried on 20 October 1802
    Elizabeth Lovelock aged 50 died of a Fracture and was buried on 10 November 1805
    Thomas Lovelock aged 50 died of 'Decline' and was buried on 24 November 1805
    Richard Lovelock aged 2 died of Watery H and was buried on 1 September 1808

Amey and David were from Star Court, as was Sarah, so it seems likely that they were siblings, bringing real tragedy to their parents. Thomas and Elizabeth were both from St Giles, so may have been husband and wife. But what are we to make of the term ‘Decline’ since the two examples given are of very different ages? Dying of a fever or a fracture both suggest there were other complications, and Richard may have been the victim of Cholera, a not uncommon disease in areas with poor sanitation, of which London had many.

Perhaps one of that incumbent’s successors was responsible for recording that Elizabeth Lovelock aged 34 died of a Miscarriage and was buried at St Anne’s on 7 May 1843.

The Smallpox cases mentioned above are certainly not the only Lovelocks or Lovelucks to have contracted the disease, but fortunately many of them will have survived. The disease is now considered to have been eradicated, but as late as 1921 one Arthur Lovelock was a patient in the Clare Hall Smallpox Hospital in South Mimms, Middlesex. Arthur recovered, married in 1931 and died only in 1986. Such hospitals were established throughout the country to isolate the patients, and the establishment pictured on the left, in Hampstead, was one of them. Details of the Hampstead hospital’s history are available here.

Smallpox was of course the first disease for which vaccination was introduced in the United Kingdom. Some key points regarding the history of smallpox vaccination in England are:

In innumerable early cases the actual cause of death would have been beyond the capabilities of the contemporary medical science to determine. One such case amongst our data is that of Fanny Lovelock who was buried at Little Bedwyn in Wiltshire on 3 November 1838. Fanny was unfortunate enough to have been married on 9 May 1826 to James Lovelock who was transported to Australia in 1835. The incumbent at Little Bedwyn found it necessary to mention this in his Burial entry, which may be considered rather unkind, but he also included a Marginal Note to the effect that an inquest had been held into Fanny’s death, and the verdict delivered was ‘Died by the visitation of God’. This was an expression often used whenever the actual cause of death was not identifiable and death was sudden and unexpected, probably covering many deaths due to strokes, heart attacks or, less commonly, afflictions such as brain tumours and internal haemorrhages. Had it occurred earlier the sudden unaccompanied death of Police Constable John Lovelock in 1873 might well have been judged as due to a visitation, but as it was the Coroner decided that death was caused by an epileptic fit.

One of our data collections that includes Cause of Death for a significant proportion of the entries is that of the Jamaican Lovelocks . With only one exception the deaths occurred in the 20th Century and reflect the advancement in diagnostic capabilities that had been a feature of 19th Century medicine.

Briefly discussed elsewhere on the Web Site is the matter of Infant Deaths – those aged 0 to 10. There were a whole raft of diseases, infections and conditions that might be responsible for an infant death, particularly before the 20th Century. Indeed in 1880 infant deaths accounted for 68% of all the Lovelock deaths occurring in England and Wales. One who succumbed to a disease we associate very much with childhood was Sarah Lovelock who died on 29 April 1844 at the age of only 2 years and 10 months of what the Registrar has recorded as ‘Hooping Cough’. But there was another Lovelock infant who must have suffered unimaginably before dying at the age of only 4 months. This was Louise Irene Lovelock from the Wiltshire-Cornwall Tree whose death the inquest jury decided was caused by 'natural causes due to exhaustion', but they were censorious of both parents in light of the neglect which a doctor's examination of Louise had revealed. He found the child extremely emaciated with very little flesh upon her bones and no food in her intestines. 'Natural causes' can of course cover a multitude of reasons, some very unusual, and whilst that was the official verdict in the case of Rose Lovelock who died aged 2 in July 1888 the doctor who attended her had no doubt that the actual cause was 'sudden spasm of the glottis, while teething'.

One disease that was very common in childhood until the 1950s in the UK was Measles. In very much earlier centuries this was often confused with smallpox and not differentiated from it until the 10th Century by a Persian physician known as Rhazes at a hospital in Baghdad. It is generally accepted that the disease was widespread in Europe in the Middle Ages, and certainly epidemics were reported in England and Scotland as late as 1670 and 1674. Considered medical opinion seems to be that it was endemic in Great Britain and Europe throughout the 18th Century, and apparently even increased in frequency of occurrence in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. In 1905 a school in Carshalton in Surrey, for which a Mr Lovelock had some sort of visiting responsibilities, closed from 9 June to 3 July 'because of the measles epidemic' as reported in the School Log Book. There must have been many Lovelocks and Lovelucks amongst measles victims, but no mention of it as the cause of death of a Lovelock or Loveluck seems to exist. Whilst it still kills upwards of 100,000 people per year in developing countries it became, thanks to vaccinations, comparatively uncommon in the UK. However, in 2023, there were no less than 1,603 suspected cases reported in England and Wales (3 of which resulted in a death), which apparently indicated a significant rise compared to previous years. Even worse, there were 2,911 laboratory-confirmed measles cases reported in England in 2024, very nearly an 82% increase compared to the 2023 figure, and the highest number of cases recorded annually since 2012. Up to 28 April there have been 320 laboratory-confirmed cases reported in 2025, almost 62% of them in children aged up to 10.