# Clarke County deaths by period, race, cause and age, 1853-1896

Counts of the deaths in Patricia B. Duncan’s transcription of the county death register: by period, race group and cause group, by age at death, and by year. Reported deaths, not rates.

- Dataset ID: `clarke-deaths-1853-1896`
- Tier: 2 (Topical)
- Version: 1.0.0
- Publication date: 2026-10-14
- Records: 318
- License: [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) (CC BY 4.0)
- Source of truth: https://ourclarke.com/deaths/

## Coverage

- In: Counts of the 2,322 death entries in Patricia B. Duncan's transcription of the Clarke County, Virginia death register, 1853 to 1896, as released on Our Clarke at /deaths/: deaths by period, race group and cause group; by period, race group and age at death; and by year and race group.
- Not in: The births entered on the register (1855 and 1856) and Duncan's cross-references. The entries on pages  of Duncan's book, which our scan did not capture. No deaths are recorded for 1860, 1862, 1863, 1869 or 1895; the register has no 1895 and stops after 1896. No population figures, so no rates.
- Effective date: 1896-12-31

## Source

Patricia B. Duncan, Clarke County, Virginia Death Register 1853-1896, with Birth Records 1855-1856 Entered on Death Register. Heritage Books, Inc., Westminster, Maryland, 2008; transcribed from the Library of Virginia microfilm of the county's death register. https://ourclarke.com/deaths/

Source file SHA-256: `3774f057506d0c40b297cfe4b7dacb5f593d576736cf4a8096db6ed86d653392`

Attribution: Credit Patricia B. Duncan's transcription (2008) whenever these counts are reused, in addition to the Our Clarke citation. The facts of each entry are public records; the transcription is copyright 2008 Patricia B. Duncan.

## Files

| File | Format | Size | Rows | SHA-256 |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| [clarke-deaths-1853-1896-2026-10-14.csv](clarke-deaths-1853-1896-2026-10-14.csv) | CSV | 17,453 bytes | 318 | `62edfda008ee620d596c5b93bebb117e3b076368f8646858df562f9d4e519e8b` |

Column definitions are in [schema.md](schema.md). Machine-readable metadata is in [datapackage.json](datapackage.json). Every file in this directory, with its size and SHA-256, is listed in [manifest.json](manifest.json).

## Held fields

- the entries themselves: Names, dates, causes as printed and every other field are on the /deaths/ page, one card per entry. This download carries counts only.
- the verbatim causes: A count of every spelling the register uses would scatter one cause across dozens of rows. The cards print each cause as recorded; the category column groups them.

## Row filters

Every row passed the download boundary's two filters before it was written: rows about a person who may be living are excluded, and rows whose state is unresolved (verify, lead, ambiguous and similar) are excluded. This publication excluded 0 rows as possibly living and 0 as unresolved at that boundary.

## Reading the data

These are deaths someone reported to a commissioner of the revenue, not death rates. Registration was incomplete and uneven: each register page is one district or commissioner, and some years are thin. A rate needs population figures, such as the 1860, 1870 and 1880 censuses, which are not in this file.

Before 1865 almost every Black death in the register is in its list of enslaved people, recorded under the enslaver and often with no cause or name. Few deaths are recorded from 1861 to 1865.

Cause groups come from ordered pattern rules over the cause as printed, with the first match winning. They are research groupings of 19th-century terms such as consumption, brain fever and cholera infantum, not modern diagnoses.

Only combinations with at least one death have a row. A combination with no row had no deaths recorded. group_deaths is the base for a share within a period and race group; do not compare shares across groups without the counts beside them.

## How to cite

Our Clarke. "Clarke County deaths by period, race, cause and age, 1853-1896." Dataset, version 1.0.0, published 2026-10-14. Heritage Books, Inc., Westminster, Maryland, 2008; transcribed from the Library of Virginia microfilm of the county's death register. https://ourclarke.com/data/#clarke-deaths-1853-1896. License: CC BY 4.0.

## Versions

Each publication is dated in its filenames. Earlier publications are kept unchanged at https://ourclarke.com/data/snapshots/.