One key point, could one lure rats away by playing on a flute?

I mean if you could it would be handy to automate it in large cities even today, no toxic poisons.

I’m not sure what evidence there is for that part of the story. It could be a tale as others have posted as to why the town lost so many children.

Sorry, you think early-modern indentured sharecropping subsidence farmers without dishwashers, laundry machines, sewing machines, or industrialized clothing production worked less than 2080 hours a year?

Subsidence farming is a brutally demanding, painful way to scrape a living. Even with modern technology, it can't be overstated the sheer amount of labor it takes to grow enough food just to feed yourself, and that's without owing an obscene portion of your product to your "landlord" (who's also your employer and your local government, and can forbid you freedom of movement and dictate your personal life).

Laundry was an immense amount of labor. Keeping the home intact took labor. Maintaining your clothes took labor.

Look up the the BBC historic farm series if you want an idea of the amount of work it takes to actually run a farm, without any of the extra problems actually living in that period would bring, such as not understanding germ theory and sanitation, unreliable access to clean water, no real medical care, no real birth control, and no defense against a bad season just breaking your back.

> It's a full generation.

This is wrong. It is 4 generations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation

« the average period, generally considered to be about 20–30 years, during which children are born and grow up, become adults, and begin to have children. »

> a great example of that phenomena

This is wrong. "Phenomena" is plural. The singular is "phenomenon."

> It's hardly mentioned in history books

Because it is living memory for a small number of people.

"Spanish flu" is widely remembered, and just 4-5 years ago thousands of articles were published comparing the measures taken a century before against a pandemic.

> small blubs

I think you meant "blurbs", as in "short informal pieces of writing", and it's a poor choice of words anyway. "To blub" means to cry.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/blub

These repeated errors strongly weaken your argument, and suggest that despite your confident tone you don't know as much as you think.

If that game of telephone includes the sentence "I'm going to kidnap your child", I'll bet it travels faster and more accurately than you think it will.

100 years doesn't require a game of telephone with 20 people. It requires maybe 2 or 3. And for a event known to a whole town, you have multiple independent narrators which can help stabilize information.

My family has far more trivial information passed down orally that is way older than 100 years.

That calculation doesn't make sense.

Except oral histories seemed to have been very important to people and passing them down accurately has been noted throughout history

The telephone game lacks features in the telling that are common in oral storytelling that help reinforce the content and reduces the number of errors. Repeated telling, repetition in the structure, rhyming and alliteration (which is used, or even if they're used, depends on the language), being made into a song (seems to stick better than just straight speaking), etc. If you played the telephone game with a deliberately constructed story using those elements and taught that story to the next "generation" by repetition over a period of time before they, in turn, repeated it to the next generation it would be much more reliable. It also wouldn't be the telephone game.

Sure but now we're doing history in the comment section where I only intended to point out that this is exactly how history is done.