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The objective of the article is an attempt at a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the “incidental” material that is present in the pages of parish registers. This source is characterized by interdisciplinarity, but is most often used by genealogists and historical demographers. Polish historiography generally lacks a synthetic approach to this issue, especially in a broader territorial and chronological perspective. The paper uses the philological method, with elements of a geographic information system used for spatial data visualization. The source basis of the article is the record resource from the area of the former Lublin district. Over 600 archival units from 60 parishes were analyzed, including the two oldest parishes in Lublin. The oldest book begins with baptism records from 1582. The end point of the research was 1810. Based on an analysis of the content of the records, which went beyond the standard form of registering the vital statistics of the population, they were grouped. In total, nearly 100 entries were registered, classified as “casual” material. The highlighted content was assigned to six groups: spiritual life, economic life and parish administration; epidemics; war and politics; natural disasters and famine; extraordinary events; literary work.

This paper centers on the infectious disease epidemics which swept through the Detva region, located in Upper Hungary (currently the territory of central Slovakia) in 1831–1920. The goal of this study is twofold: firstly, to examine the extent to which deaths caused by epidemics of infectious disease influenced life expectancy, the proportion of the deceased and survivors, and the probability of death in the Detva population, and secondly, to measure selection pressures through differential mortality, with a focus on deaths caused by infectious disease epidemics. We used individual information on age at death and causes of death in the Detva region, derived from the Detva parish records (N = 29,338). Infectious disease epidemics were the main regulator of mortality in the Detva region, as confirmed by our findings. Excluding deaths caused by infectious diseases from the dataset raised the life expectancy of a new-born and of an adult by 1–5 years and 1–2 years, respectively. The fraction of those surviving to the age of 5, the onset of maturity (15 years) and the onset of senility (60 years) also increased, while there was a decline in the proportion of deceased and the probability of dying. When deaths caused by infectious disease epidemics were removed from the analyses, selection pressures also weakened, as evidenced by the values of measures for the operation of natural selection.

In the article, I discuss the seasonality of marriages, conceptions and first conceptions in early modern communities from the territory of present-day Poland. I looked for the influence of the Catholic liturgical calendar there. The source basis was the data published so far in the literature. The analysis shows that church restrictions forced the faithful to marry in the months immediately before Lent and Advent. This resulted in an increase in post-marital sexual activity during the period when abstinence was recommended. This conclusion weakens the notion that the Catholic Church controlled the daily lives of early modern Polish inhabitants.

The paper traces the gradual transition from a society in which the age structure graph for female deaths has two distinct peaks punctuated by an area of low mortality at menopause (as if menopause reverses the trend, giving women a new life expectancy), to a model in which the age structure for men and women is similar, but women die later. The change observed was that the local minimum for female deaths (aged 41–45) remained the same, but one of the maxima (the group of women for whom life expectancy ended at the end of childbearing age) disappeared. Male deaths do not exhibit such a pattern, which can account for why men have benefited much less from the increase in life expectancy. The analysis is based on 470,000 Polish newspaper obituaries from 1845 to 1939 in which 205,000 people were listed, and from these 165,000 were selected for whom the age at death is known.

The article discusses the demographic consequences of crop failures in the northeastern districts of Augustów Governorate in late 1845 and early 1846. It also raises the question of assessing the reliability of the sources that recorded vital statistics in the Russian partition, which revealed many inconsistencies in the registration of deaths, and notes the need for a critical approach when using them. Also highlighted was a wave of famine-induced emigration of peasants and the need for further and in-depth research into demographic crises in mid-19th century Polish lands.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the structural characteristics of the information held in Civil Registry Office records on people reporting the death of an infant. Some fifteen thousand death records held at the CRO in Szczecin (Stettin) at the end of the 19th century were examined in order to answer the fundamental question of what research information is provided by people reporting the death of an infant. The research shows that despite the sparse information in the CRO files on people reporting infant deaths, interesting relationships can be observed. These include professional or family ties between the notifiers and the parents of the deceased infants.

The article examines marriage in the Podlasie Catholic parish of Lapy from 1919–1939. It considers the occupations of the grooms, the age at which the couples married and the seasonality (monthly and weekly) of marriages. The source for the article was the Łapy parish registers kept at the Registry Office in Łapy. The registers of neighboring parishes were also used for analysis and then the results were compared with the immediate neighborhood. The article shows that when founding a new family, one of the main factors, together with the time of year and week, was the man’s occupation.

Taking advantage of relatively well-preserved Prussian statistics, the author examines the dynamics of the Pomeranian population in the 18th century to suggest priorities for further studies at both the individual and local community level. He proposes to take the concept of the mode of reproduction as their common paradigm and also take a functionalist approach, even if detailed research may reveal that it was not external forces, as older theories proclaim, but internal forces of destabilization that finally destroyed the assumed system.

Our research explores issues related to the process of classifying causes of death, using information from parish registers of burials included in the Historical Population Database of Transylvania (HPDT), and covering the period between 1850 and 1920. In the first phase, causes of death were subjected to several processes of standardization, English-language equivalence and accommodation according to the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision (ICD-10), a system often used in the field of historical demography. At a later stage, we developed a classification scheme suitable for the Transylvanian population in the past. Consequently, the Historical Causes of Death in Transylvania (HCDT) system has a narrower taxonomy, comprising only eight chapters with several subgroups, which take into the account the historical realities of Transylvania. Therefore, the HCDT system can be used as a research tool that meets the specific needs of historical demography and of the history of medicine, being also capable of providing pertinent answers to fundamental questions about historic mortality. The scheme proposed in our research could potentially be used for comparative analyses with other regions and historic populations.

The article discusses issues related to the occurrence of illegitimate births in the rural Roman Catholic community of Trzebieszów parish in the Łuków region, in the years 1815–1867. This article addresses issues related to the number of births out of wedlock, the social and territorial origin of the illegitimate children, the mothers’ marital status, and the children’s gender. The source basis for the analysis was the parish registers from 1815–1867. The results of the analyzes showed that the births of illegitimate children accounted for 3.29% of those recorded in the parish. The research showed that children born out of wedlock came predominantly from the working population of peasant origin, who most often lived on farmsteads (‘zaścianki’) and estate villages, where a manor house or grange (‘folwark’) was located, among other things.

Population censuses from before the second half of the 18th century are rare in Poland. Therefore, an exceptional find in the parish archives of the former Latin rite Chełm diocese is the confessional register from Bończa, dating from 1728–1750. Its publication, which is the inclusion into academic circulation of valuable source material, provides an opportunity for specialists in historical demography to study the data it contains, especially with regard to household structure and the developmental cycle of domestic groups. Wider research is also made possible by the parish registers of baptisms and deaths preserved from that period.

A vast, two-volume list of all the towns and villages of the Kingdom of Poland was published in 1827, with the number of houses and residents, and the type of ownership specified in it. It was the only official publication issued by the then central statistical body of the state – The Statistical Office of the Government Commission for the Internal Affairs and Police. Due to the alphabetical order of the entries, with the absence of any territorial grouping or partial summaries, this potentially valuable source for historical and demographic studies has been of only marginal use to historians. An attempt was made at its digitisation and at entering the data into the database system in 2020. This paper presents the historical background of creating this list and uses selected examples to present new, previously unavailable data exploration and analysis opportunities that are offered by an electronic form.

The base research source for the article are the registers of premarital announcements from the years 1913–1924. It contained 1296 register of engaged couples, nearly half of which were exogemic (mixed denominations), mostly Polish-Ukrainian. The mentioned registered are (for the most part) comparable. The personal data of the couples and their parents, place and date of birth, place of inhabitancy and religion and specific denomination. They alsocontain links and summaries of different documents and certificates produced by the eparchial curia. The contents are richer than the later marital books. They register in detail the state of mixed relationships in statu nascendi, at the moment of their forming, making preparations for the wed-ding and gathering the needed documentation and taking the vow among witnesses, along with the signature on the document. The personal range is also much wider, because the registers also contained mentions of engagements that were cancelled and couples, that received the sacrament in the temple of the female bethrothed, in the Roman Catholic denomination. The books present the social and religious phenomenon in the form of mixed Polish-Ukrainian marriages in the frontier territories of the Rzeczpospolita.

The article showcases new proposals for research on the urbanization processes of Krakow Voivodeship (province) between the 16th and 18th centuries referred to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a whole. The possible methods of study have been specified for an area where an urban network had already been formed. It comprised some 80 towns, mostly moderate in size, with a variety of functions. The period under discussion is crucial for the functioning of Polish urban areas due to the predominance of the manorial farm system relying on serfdom and corvée. Population exchange mechanisms are addressed against a broader background of social history. It is proposed that analyses of the urbanization of the voivodeship should be linked to its central hub – the Krakow urban complex. The discussion also extends to the criteria underlying the formulation of the study questionnaire. A relational database created on the basis of mass sources would cover the population of Krakow and successively other towns in the voivodeship, selected according to their functions. Such procedure makes it possible to demonstrate the migration trends across the voivodeship in a long-term historical process.

The objective of the article is an attempt to find the answer to whether the agrarian reforms of the 1860s carried out in Russia affected the individual’s life cycle in peasant Catholic families in Podlasie which, after 1807, was included in the Grodno Governorate. In Polish historiography the subject of the individual and the family’s life cycle in the 19th century has not yet been adequately researched; hence these studies are intended to fill this gap, at least in part. In this paper a cross-section analysis of demographic phenomena was employed, which is based on three lists of the inhabitants of the large Podlasie parish of Trzcianne, drawn up in the years 1843–1910. The research value of the lists was evaluated with the help of three indexes: Whipple’s index, the total modified Whipple’s index (Wtot) and ABCC. The application of the cross-section method aimed at illustrating the dependence between the age and the status of the individual (children, household servants, householders, independent female heads of households, relatives and lodgers) in the household. The article devotes more attention to the pace of children’s leaving family homes, as well as the status of old people, i.e., 65 years old and above, always including their sex.

The article presents infant mortality in Polish historical research and points towards more important works focusing on the above issue. The author analyses approximately seventy academic works in order to answer the fundamental question as to what extent they deal with the issue of deaths in children under the age of one. The research shows that, in particular groups of research papers, infant mortality is most often presented in a general and formulaic manner. A dozen or so papers present this problem as a side issue in their research and only a few Polish studies have infant mortality as their main issue and discuss it in a multi-faceted and broader context.

The aim of the research is to trace the process of demographic transition in the area of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, enlarged by areas with a predominantly Polish-speaking population, Upper Silesia and Cieszyn Silesia, as well as Southern Masuria. The time frame of the work covers the years 1865–1912. changes in the basic indicators of the vital statistics of the population were analyzed: the crude death rate (death rate per 1,000 population), the crude birth rate and the crude marriage rate. The source of the data is the work of Adam Krzyżanowski and Kazimierz Kumaniecki, Statystyka Polski [Statistics of Poland], which was in fact the first statistical yearbook of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and other predominantly Polish-speaking areas. The analysis was carried out strictly according to the requirements of the demographic transition theory. A comparative analysis of the demographic situation in these lands on the eve of the outbreak of World War I was carried out using Ward’s taxonomic method and the k-means method. The results of the analysis indicate that the process of demographic transition in these lands was varied and was conditioned by their economic development and geographical location.

The article aims to show the value that Protestant parish registers kept in the State Archives in Szczecin have for demographic research. The paper will also examine the internal structure of the Pomeranian and New Marchian parish registers, showing the changes that took place in the records over a period of more than 350 years (from the end of the 16th century to the mid-20th century). The material is also intended to encourage academics to use the sources in their research work.

The article aims to reconstruct the number of inhabitants in the Gubin district in the early post-war years. The statistical data available include previously unused source material in the form of reports and lists of the district administrator and the State Repatriation Office (PUR). The displacement of Germans and the influx of Poles will be discussed, the district’s population levels will be given with a division into town and village, and the speed of change in 1945–1949 will be indicated, as well as the population structure in terms of sex, age, nationality and direction of influx (repatriates from the East and West and displaced people from central Poland).

The goal of this study was to examine whether and to what extent sex ratio values at birth may have reflected social and economic inequalities in the Province of Poznań (German: Provinz Posen) in the last decades of the 1800s and early 1900s. It was assumed that maternal economic, social and emotional well-being differed according to the size of the place of residence (Poznań / town / village) and her marital status (married / unmarried). In the population of the Province, urban areas (e.g., Poznań) and single motherhood were the predictors increasing the chance that the proportion of boys to girls at birth would decline below the biological norm. These factors could affect women during pregnancy through biological (physiological) mechanisms induced by adverse economic conditions (poverty, poor housing conditions, physical effort related to work and spatial mobility) and psychological stress (lack of social approval and support, social instability, occurrence of stigmatization, etc.). It is worth noting, however, that the variability of sex ratio values at birth could also be due to other factors, not identified (captured) in this paper.

During the first cholera epidemic in Vilnius in 1831, a hospital for cholera patients was set up in the Pohulanka district. Over a thousand patients were treated there, of whom approximately half died. Although it was intended for the Roman Catholic population, people of various faiths were admitted. The article is an attempt at a demographic and social analysis of those who died during the epidemic, with the source for the research the register of those who died of cholera, drawn up and kept between April 10, 1831 and January 3, 1832 by Father Kazimierz Kontrym. Thanks to the preserved data, it was possible to determine the age structure of 553 men and women, their religion, social status, information on whether they received the last rites and where they were buried.

The article discusses a book focusing on migration strategies as exemplified by the area surrounding the city of České Budějovice in the second half of the eighteenth century. Formally, the peasant population in Bohemia was bound in serfdom until 1781, which has until recently been believed to have considerably curtailed its mobility. The underlying research is based mostly on letters of discharge and registers of births, marriages and deaths. The author sets out to explain the migration strategies followed by the residents of villages situated in the surroundings of a major urban center. He discusses the migrants’ main motivations and the ways in which they tried to relocate within the bounds of the law. Special attention is paid to movements relating to labor markets and matrimony. The issue of migration strategies is discussed against a vast social background.

The article attempts to establish basic demographic parameters for the inhabitants of Wieliczka in the 18th century. The aim of the research is to investigate whether the nature of Wieliczka family farms was similar to the results obtained in other cities and regions located in Polish lands and areas of western Europe. The research was based on the 1788 census of the inhabitants of St. Clemens parish in Wieliczka, and the Wieliczka register books.

The aim of the article is to present life expectancy calculations for magnates, the elite of the nobility (but not an exact equivalent of European aristocracy) from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th–18th centuries (life tables for women and men). The paper also contains a comparison with the results previously obtained for Western European aristocracy. The author tried to verify if there were differences in life expectancy between men and women from two parts of the Commonwealth: The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Because only a small amount of data was collected, 95% confidence intervals were calculated from the sample. The calculations were based on genealogical data collected for 8 families from the Kingdom of Poland and 9 Lithuanian families.

The article is an introduction to the state of development of historical demographic studies in Ukrainian historiography. The authors try to explain why, at a time when historical demography was the mainstream in world historiography, it made practically no progress in Soviet Ukraine, and its achievements were left unused in historians’ research. The reasons for interest in historical demography today, and its influence on the development of historical anthropological research, are also analyzed. The authors describe the main research centers, examine the subjects of study and discuss the prospects for development.

The main source for this article is a population census carried out in Przemyśl in 1918, previously unused in any scientific research. Using a survey method, it encompassed single households; only some of the material exists to this day, a larger part stored in the Sanok Archive, and a smaller in the National Archive in Przemyśl. The census combined the elements of the earlier “State of Souls” (status animarum) in relation to households and the more modern type of Austrian survey to which new categories were added; its original form enables new methods for analyzing the local population of that area. The circumstances in which the census was carried out are unknown; we can assume that it was conducted by the local magistrate, due to food shortages and mass migration of the population (including the military) to the city. The surviving 1,163 cards enable us to pinpoint personal data from the respondents, such as sex, age, religion and nationality, place of birth and address, and in some cases social status and profession.

The Polish-Lithuanian Parliament of 1569– 1795 consisted of three houses: The King, Senate and House of Representatives. The King and Representatives were elected in general election. The members of the Senate were arbitrarily appointed by the King for a lifetime tenure. There is an extensive literature on the forming of the Polish-Lithuanian elite of power in the 16th–18th centuries. The article proves that the literature missed several vital aspects of the issue. Even if the appointments to the Senate were arbitrary, they reflected the real position of politicians in the country’s social network, as if the social network were the real ruling power in the country, influencing the King’s decisions. And the status of politicians was better connected to the network position of their mothers and wives than to their surname and male line.

The aim of the article is to present the professional and spatial craftsmanship structure within the Poznań Department, based on the results of a census conducted during the period of the Duchy of Warsaw. The analyses presented, which include quantitative ones using statistical methods, are therefore related to the pre-enfranchisement period, following which the Poznań Department definitively embarked on a “Prussian path of capitalistic development”. Therefore, the results may serve as a starting point for evaluating the economic changes that took place in the research area in the 19th century. Having used multidimensional methods, I shall be proposing regionalization of the Poznań Department, due to the structure of crafts in the early years of the 19th century. Census data also allow for the identification of key crafts in the Poznań Department at the threshold of industrialization, as well as groups of interrelated branches. The research will also, indirectly, indicate the importance of historical awareness in the selection of grouping methods at subsequent stages of research that is based on historical quantitative data.

The article presents weddings in the parish of Płonka Kościelna in the years 1826– 1864, on the basis of parish registers residing in the parish archive. It contains basic issues such as the age of the betrothed and their marital status. Special attention was paid to the questions of having living parents on the day of wedding, and, what follows, the betrotheds’ place of residence. The element of service is presented as a stage in the life cycle of an individual. The research employed statistical methods as well as selected examples of weddings and the couples involved.

Emigration from the territory of Poland was a mass phenomenon at the end of the 19th century. Its characteristic feature was that it was gainful emigration, and the predominant destination was the United States. The second most popular destination was West European countries (mainly Germany). Emigration to Russia took place on a smaller scale. In the interwar period, the rate of emigration decreased markedly. The directions also changed: the US became less popular, and emigration to France and Belgium gained in importance. Seasonal emigration (Germany, Latvia) was important from the economic and social points of view. This paper aims at analyzing the demographic dimension of both waves of emigration, and to estimate the scale and structure of emigration at regional level in 1870–1914 and 1918–1938 in order to determine net “loss” in population. The method was the analysis of census statistics from 1890–1931 at the regional level (for the late 1930s, estimates) and the analysis of emigration statistics.

My paper reviews a book on internal migrations and the micromobility of peasants in 18th-century northern Burgundy. Its author set out to demonstrate the significance of geographical mobility and its widespread occurrence, mostly through the statistical analysis of mass sources. The work is an example of the use of mixed methods and diverse sources. Jeremy Hayhoe primarily based his research on the depositions of witnesses in court trials (previously largely unused), the Napoleonic Census (1808–1813), tax registers, and marriage records. Based on these sources, a database of 70,000 records was compiled. The research covered marital exogamy, ratios of local to incoming populations, distances covered, and annual migration rates. The book discusses migrations in terms of their duration, pull and push factors, human motivations, and the ways in which local communities tried to regulate the inflows of people. The research indicates that a majority of the population of rural areas in eighteenth-century northern Burgundy experienced migration in their individual lives. This was usually motivated by economic reasons and undertaken over short distances. While movements of a temporary nature were predominant, they played an important role in the functioning of local communities.

In 1848 the world was ravaged by one of the deadliest cholera outbreaks of the 19th century. From among the Northwestern Russian governorates, it was Mogilev which suffered most and where, over a sixmonth period, over 48,000 people fell sick, of whom 31.4% eventually died of the plague. When taking the incidence rate into consideration, the districts of Orsza and Sienno were hardest hit as, due to both the geophysical conditions (large numbers of bogs, swamps, periodic river floods, high soil moisture etc.) and the prevailing social and civilizational determinants (poor sanitary conditions in the towns and villages, the lack of water supply lines or sewage systems, low pure water accessibility, very limited medical care etc.) the Vibrio cholerae had particularly favorable conditions for development. The article presents the conditions for the development of the outbreak, its course, and the methods of treatment for a disease which was poorly understood at that time.

The article presents deaths in the Rzeszów parish between the years 1876–1913, based on the parish register. Attention was paid to facts, which could confirm (or deny) the process of the first demographic transition. This took place in Galicja at the turn of the 20th century and was marked by a decrease in death intensity, a subsequent increase in birth rate followed by temporary high population growth, only to establish a low, stable level in the final phase. The analysis takes into account the population of the parish, the number of deaths, death rate, stillbirths, structure of deaths according to sex, age and causes of death, along with the average age of the deceased. Statistical methods were used.

The issue of the incomplete civil registration of Jewish marriages in areas of Poland occupied by Austria between 1772 and 1918 (the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria and the Grand Duchy of Cracow) demands closer analysis and clarification. Marriage records are very important in genealogy and historical demography; thus, irregularities in their registration rate can have a serious impact on the accuracy of data. Also, the legal status of a child (legitimate or illegitimate) can be an important factor that should not be neglected and need to be well understood. We collected data on the births and marriages of Jews from the city of Cracow and employed the procedure of family reconstitution to analyze families with parents who were officially married (legitimate), who had never married (illegitimate) and where marriage occurred years after the children were born (legitimized by subsequent marriage). This allowed the authors to study the dynamics of both the phenomenon of “ritual marriage” as such (when it appears, reaches its peak and vanishes) and of the families (how many and how often children are being born and when such marriage can ultimately become legitimized).

The main purpose of the paper is to familiarize readers with the parish registers kept by the pastors of the Calvinist (French) commune in Szczecin. They allow us to follow changes in the number of births, marriages and deaths among the French community in the city for 220 years (from 1721 to 1943). The article discusses the structure of all of the books kept by the commune as well as the changes occurring in the commune. This material also aims to encourage potential researchers to become interested in the source provided.

This article postulates revising the previous arrangements for demographic change in modern Gdańsk, which were devised nearly 30 years ago by the Gdańsk researcher Jan Baszanowski, who died prematurely in 1989, and which appeared in a posthumously-published monograph. Baszanowski’s calculations, based only on tables of vital statistics drawn up by municipal agencies, should be compared with entries in the registers (relatively wellpreserved for the modern period) from Gdańsk parishes (both Protestant and Catholic). Analysis of the registers will also provide new data. Without questioning the general statistical trends outlined in Baszanowski’s findings, it is absolutely imperative to return to research on the demography of Gdańsk and other cities in Royal Prussia.

This study aims at finding the level of literacy among people marrying in two parishes of the city of Cracow in the first half of the 19th century. The ability to sign the marriage contract is then analyzed within the context of the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of the individuals. Thus far, scant attention has been paid to this issue in the Polish historiography. Hence, this paper is an attempt to at least partially fill this gap. This research was based on the civil marriage registers from two city parishes – St. Florian and Holy Cross (1810–1846). The database contains information on 2790 individuals. The data was analyzed with the use of traditional methods (descriptive statistics, Maggiolo methods) and logistic regression models. The results show the links between literacy and independent variables (age, civil status, occupation, geographic origin, parents’ vital status etc.) in the form of odds ratios.

This article aims to establish the reasons behind divorces among the Pomeranian Protestant nobility in the 2nd half of the 18th century and at the beginning of the 19th century, with the intention to verify existing conclusions on the scale of marriage breakdown within that group of Prussian society. The source literature is dominated by the view that relationships built by Pomeranian land owners were durable and a significant growth in the number of divorces was not to occur earlier than the turn of the 20th century. The research is based on information extracted from family and historical chronicles, which allows an examination of divorce decisions. The results of the research will be used to determine the place occupied by divorce in the collective consciousness of the Pomeranian nobility. The conclusions will be drawn from an analysis employing the theory of conjunctural action.

This article focuses on the history of the family and households in eighteenth-century Ukraine. The aim of the article is to observe the demographical characteristics of craftsman guild families and households in the Cossack Hetmanate (an autonomous Cossack territory situated on the Left Bank of the Dnieper River) in the cities of Poltava, Pereiaslav and Nizhyn. Calculations are based on the General Description of the Left-bank Ukraine of 1765–1766. In the article, population size indicators for the artisan households and their families are established. Family household types are defined on the basis of works by Peter Lasslett and Cezary Kuklo. Craft specialization is taken into account for clarifying the influence of the occupation on the size of the households and family household types. The calculations were made separately for the crafts that were the most widespread in all the cities: weaving, blacksmithing, tailoring, shoemaking and butchering.

The article documents the importance and significance of castle and land court books for studying the history of the early modern Ukrainian family, many aspects of which so far have hardly been explored. An overview of the history and the content of Volhynian court books is provided, and the documents that contain information on contemporary families are detailed and analyzed. The court books are shown to represent a comprehensive and valuable source that helps reconstruct single and extended family structures, identify kin relations, characterize demographic behaviour, and study intra-family relationships. The analysis of the court books suggests that some stereotypes about the early modern Ukrainian family need to be revised.

The article concerns the Jewish community living in Bialystok, northeastern Poland’s largest city, who, in the post-war period, lived through processes which led to its complete disappearance. As a consequence of World War II, the population of the community decreased from over 40,000 to a maximum of 1,500. The research revealed further changes, mainly caused by migratory movements and the process of acculturation. Further subjects of study were the structure of the sex and age of this population, very much altered due to the Holocaust, and the professional structure, shaped by attempts to return to pre-war occupations, but undergoing changes due to political reforms in Poland. The condition of the Białystok Jews is a clear example of the situation in which this minority found itself in post-war Poland. For this reason, this issue may be interesting not only for local and regional researchers, but also for those interested in the fate of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe, the demographic consequences of World War II as well the nationalist policy of communist governments and the effects of the forced socio-economic changes resulting from them.

The article outlines research in recent decades on the history of mobility and migration in the premodern era. The increasingly advanced methods and sources used have fueled debate on the actual level of spatial and social mobility in bygone societies. An interdisciplinary approach to the subject matter of study and the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods have resulted in a picture showing a relatively high rate of human mobility, especially with regard to internal migrations and micromobility, in premodern Europe. To gain a better understanding of the migration mechanisms, the research has been focused on local communities (both those that sent off and those that received migrants), migration strategies, and in particular on rural-to-urban movements, as sources of social change.

The article uses data contained in the records of the legitimization of children made in the District Court of the Radomsko District between 1845 and 1874. Using the statistical method, the analysis was based on sex, age, social and territorial origin, names and surnames of the children. Most of the children were born out of wedlock to parents from the lower social classes in the judicial district under study. They did not have first names that would stigmatize them and most often bore their mother’s maiden name. Almost all the cases of legitimization concerned male offspring, mostly mature men. Most often, parents wanted to prove that their son was an only son, which was associated with the desire to protect him from serving in the Russian army.

The article presents the current state of research into vital events in the Region of Lublin and identifies the research problems which were connected with parish registers, the basic source in the research of that kind. Henryk Wiercieński is considered the forerunner of that research; at the beginning of the 20th century he initiated an action of counting three series of data. After the Second World War the work was continued by Zygmunt Sułowski and his followers. Thanks to several generations of researchers it is now possible to identify the basic threats of the continuous registration in the Lublin Region, among which the main ones are: the completeness of the sources, the access to the existing resources and a significant amount of effort. In the case of the Lublin Region the situation is even more difficult as after 1797 there were three types of registers, the Tridentine forms, the Austrian forms and the Napoleonic (Polish) forms. The numbers of registers happened to be different in different sources. The article also presents the current research into vital events in the Lublin Region, where new techniques and methods have been used, such as the inverse projection and the digitalisation of registers kept in parish archives, now accessible to much more researchers.

The article has been written to reveal the main features of households of Siemiatycze with their dominant model and the presence of various categories of household members – relatives, servants and lodgers. In that way it will be possible to join the discussion on the geography of the European structure of households. According to the accepted model Europe is divided into two spheres: western and eastern; the model has been later modified. In the western sphere the dominant household has been simple with high participation rates of servants and tenants; and in the eastern sphere – eastern part of Poland belongs to that sphere – the dominant households were elaborate, generally without hired blue-collar workers. The source basis for the research has been a hand-written list of Roman Catholic parishes of 1807. After analysing the sources it has turned out that in Siemiatycze, in spite of the village being situated in the eastern sphere, the dominant model of households was the one typical of Western Europe. Simple households were in the majority (74%), and multi-family households were rare (7%).

The article presents an analysis of the demographic structure of the Roman Catholic population in the County of Proszowice on the basis of the censuses carried out in the years 1790–1792 by the Civil-Military Order Commission [Polish: Komisja Porządkowa Cywilno-Wojskowa] of the Cracow Voivodeship. Thanks to the available sources it is possible to reconstruct the population of villages and towns of a big county of the Cracow Voivodeship, according to their sex, age and marital status. It is also possible to compare those results with other regions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

The aim of the article is to analyse the phenomenon of prostitution from the point of view of the socio-demographic situation of the 1950s. The sources used in the research (mainly documents drawn up by the Interior Ministry and the General Headquarters of Civic Militia) have been analysed. They, as well as other sources, served as a basis for a further analysis to define the prostitution of the end of the 1950s. The analysis included, inter alia, the socio-demographic features of prostitutes, their types and problems, especially connected with health. The character of the phenomenon should be paid a special attention to. In most cases it was a street prostitution, and its later evolution took place in the 1960s.

The article presents the question of the popularity of Christian names children were baptised in the urban-rural church parish in Rzeszów at the beginning of the 20th century on the basis of parish registers. The following problems have been analysed: the number of births in the parish, single Christian names and the multiple ones, the most popular boys’ and girls’ names, a relation between the name and the month the child was born or baptised, children born out of wedlock and their names. The analysis takes into account the difference between the city of Rzeszów and the villages belonging to the church parish of Rzeszów. Statistical methods have been used.

In the aftermath of the First World War there were a lot of migrations. One of them was the evacuation of civilian population into the depths of Russia. The aim of the publication is a demographic and statistical analysis of households of the western counties of the Grodno Governorate evacuated to the Tomsk Governorate in the summer of 1915. The source basis is the list of the evacuated people printed in Tomsk in 1916. The text presents the changes in the demographic structure of the analysed households and the demographic and ethnic consequences of the First World War for the community of the Grodno Governorate.