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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 Krzyzanowski 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 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.

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.

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 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 article discusses a book focusing on migration strategies as exemplified by the area surrounding the city of Ceske 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 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 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).

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 a demographic description of reconstructed families in the Parish of Nowy Korczyn in the second half of the 18th century. The description has been made thanks to the method of family reconstruction recognised in demography, created by Louis Henry, which consists in assigning all events recorded in the parish registers to married couples. As a result, 265 closed families and 317 open families have been reconstructed. Additionally, the research has included the so called complete families. Three series of parish registers of Nowy Korczyn kept in the Diocesan Archives in Kielce were the source basis for the research. The completeness of the records varied considerably. The results obtained turned out to be similar to the ones observed before: a higher percentage of premarital conceptions older women, extension of the inter-genetic interval in case of the death of the previous child before it reached the age of one year, the longest latest interval between childbirths, widowers contracting new marriages faster than widows, the correlation between contracting a new marriage and the number of living children.

The article is an attempt to answer the question whether professed religious affiliation influenced the number of children in aristocratic Christian families and whether there were other factors with some impact on that demographic parameter. The analysis has been carried out on the database containing the numbers of children who reached adulthood in aristocratic families – 41 Orthodox, 40 Calvinistic and 89 Catholic – living in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (formally the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) in the 16th century and the first half of the 17th century.

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 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 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.

Rafał Smoczyński and Tomasz Zarycki proposed a thesis that in Poland around 1920 the intelligentsia had taken power from the aristocracy and bourgeoisie (it is called ‘intelligentsia revolution’). They advanced another thesis that the reference point (‘totem’) for the identity of the intelligentsia had been ‘an extended family’ composed of descendants of the aristocracy. The article is an analysis of the structure of the Polish society when the intelligentsia was being born (the middle of the 19th century). The author tries to establish if it was then possible to predict the above mentioned revolution and the shape of the twentieth-century Polish intelligentsia and whether any other course of events was possible. In the years 1821–1861 Kurier Warszawski published obituaries of 18,038 people who – together with their families – were considered to be so important that without knowing them it was hardly possible to function in the society. In this way it is possible to reconstruct family connections so that it would be established which families were worth knowing more and which ones occurred in the press only sporadically. If the endogamy of the elites is taken for granted, it is not difficult to indicate concentrations and centres of gravity – social circles of special attraction; the ones who dominated and the others who could take that dominance away from them.

The article presents the difficulties with introducing a new system of civil registrar offices in Poland after World War II. In 1945 the decree on birth, marriage and death registers was passed. It had big importance for the success of the process of the unification of civil law, which took place then. The prevailing part of the Polish society knew nothing about the lay system of registrar’s office and they followed Catholic Church regulations in this matter. The result was that in 1946 less than half of births, marriages and deaths were registered in the civil offices. The article describes the measures which were undertaken to force the society to register. The new communist government had a dilemma whether it would be better to use arguments of the utilitarian character or rather to force people by using sanctions. The first method turned out to be more important.

The article presents research problems and changes in the thematic extension of the works published in the 38 volumes of Poland’s Demographic Past (Przeszłość Demograficzna Polski, PDP) for the last 50 years. At the same time the author attempts to depict academic centres that have conducted research into the state, vital events and migrations of populations and defines research profiles typical of them. The article also indicates Polish territories and neighbouring regions, as well as chronological periods, which have been the most popular fields of research for the last fifty years.

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.

This paper attempts to provide a detailed characteristic of social relations among the inhabitants of Iwanowice parish, a rural area near Krakow, over a time span of fifteen years within the first half of the 19th century. Social network analysis tools are used for an assessment of the effect of various factors, such as place of residence, occupational structure, age, literacy and religious denomination, on the shaping of the observed social order. Moreover, additional graph measures are used to identify the key social actors of the community.

The article presents the problem of registering certificates of the congregation of the Kazimierz Deanery outside the native parish. According to the accepted hypothesis the scale of the phenomenon depended on the distance between the nearest church and the place of residence. The research has been based on many sources. In total, the author shave examined the certificates from 13 out of 15 parishes making up the deanery of Kazimierz in the 18th century and additionally a few neighbouring parishes. The collected material has been analysed with the use of the GIS instruments. The results suggest that the scale of the phenomenon was not big. In the case of baptisms, the median of the children baptised outside their native parish was at the level of 3.1. No clear correlation between the number of baptisms and the distance has been detected. On the basis of the results it is possible to conclude that the decisive role in the choice of the place of administering sacraments was the so-called parish coercion. In order to obtain more precise data it seems necessary to enlarge the research basis with certificates from other parishes of the Lublin Voivodeship and to take into consideration a bigger number of the variables that influenced the scale of registering outside the native parish in the statistical analysis.

Communist ideology transformed the size, functions, structure and legal foundations of the family in Soviet Russia. There were objective and subjective factors which brought about active reforms of the family in the 1920s: the objective factors involved the modernization processes in the society, while the subjective ones were conscious attempts to construct the family institution in accordance with the idealized concept of the future society. The 1920s family reform generated multiple family types, shaped in particular by ideological concepts and beliefs. This paper analyzes the data from a unique source, the All-Russia Communist Party Census of 1922, which provides information about the number of people and the ratio of workers to dependents in Party members’ families. Party members constituted the social group which was the most susceptible to ideology, which renders their family structure particularly interesting. These data also reflect the general trends in the early Soviet society and their scale. We put a special emphasis on the analysis of new family forms such as communal family, ‘revolutionary’ family, and so on.

The article initiates a publishing cycle devoted to the description of modernising processes taking place in the 19th century in the areas east of the Vistula River. The publications are intended to present the state, distribution and demographic structureof the rural population (peasants and the lower layers of the gentry) living within the parish of Trzcianne at the end of the first half of the 19th century; the parish was situated peripherally in relation to the changes taking place in Europe. A handwrittenlist of the inhabitants of the parish, dated 1843, is the main source. The features of the population under research were its extended reproduction and a tiny size of definite celibacy. The main goal of both basic social groups – peasants and pettygentry – was to found a family as soon as possible.

A coincidence has made it possible to create a new academic discipline in the borderland of genealogy and historical demography. Using the Social Network Analysis (SNA) the new discipline answers the questions of sociology and social history. The article presents an example of applying massive genealogy to an essentially sociological analysis: what the distribution of the cultural and social capital is like and how it is transmitted. In addition, the article shows how it is possible to measure a certain weight which seems to be a yardstick of the capital in question or at least of the component that is transmitted through families. The examples presented in the article are quantities calculated on the basis of the situation of a person in a big family network such as the chance of being a hero of an article in the Polish Biographical Dictionary or thechance – if the person died between 1821 and 1861 – of being mentioned in ‘Kurier Warszawski’. The article also contains an analysis of social prestige of various professions in the 19th a nd 2 0th centuries (based on the analysis of the headlines of entries in the Polish Biographical Dictionary) and the presentation of differences in the impact of paternal and maternal ancestors on the chance of their child becoming a member of the Academy of Sciences.

The article presents problems and prospects of palaeodemographic research on burial grounds of the Wielbark Culture exemplified with Site no 12 in Kowalewko.So far mainly mortality tables havebeen used in the research. But, as it seems, taking into consideration limitations of that method and the specificity of the input data, i.e. the graves, it is impossible to obtain trustworthy results. The article presents and analyses an alternative solution, exemplified with the burial site in Kowalewko chosen for its representativeness. For comparative reasons the results have been juxtaposed with an analysis of a Medieval skeleton burial site in Kaldus.

The Parish in Konopnica was created in the first half of the 15th century. Before the partitions of Poland it belonged to the Cracow diocese, and in 1805 it became part of theLublin diocese, which had just been set up. The presented census of the congregation of 1760 is a list of the people authorised to the Easter confession. The statistical data aresituated in the oldest existing death register, which takes up six pages. In total, there are 1393 people mentioned. The form is homogeneous. Each item is numbered, which isfollowed by the first name and surname of the head of the family, other members of the family, and finally the number of all the members of the household. What is missing isthe age of the people and the numbers of the houses.

The article contains a demographicdescription of the ancient Polish familyexemplified with the parish of NowyKorczyn in the second half of the 18th century.The content of the article has beendetermined by the continuity and relativecompleteness of the records in the parishregisters on the one hand. On accountof the size of the parish registers (whichrequired a lot of time to investigate), thescope of research has been reduced tothe last 50 years of the First Republic. Asa result the source material comprises severalhundreds of reconstructed families;it has been used to analyse the basic problemsconcerning families of that time.The first part of the article presents a briefdescription of the parish of Nowy Korczyn,the aims, methods and sources. Themain part of the article contains a depictionof the reconstructed families (closed,complete and open), and an analysis of thetotal fertility rate. The final part of the articleconcentrates on the kind of fertilitytypical of the Nowy-Korczyn women (naturalor controlled), and is an attempt toanswer the question whether the womenused contraceptive methods.

There are two aims in the article; firstly, to present the theoretical assumptions and the calculation techniques used in inverse projection. The method, widely known in the Anglo-Saxon literature, created in the 1970s by Ronald D. Lee and developed by members of the so-called Cambridge Group has not beenyet comprehensively discussed or applied by Polish demographers. The second aim is practical and consists in carrying out simulations confirming the flexibility while choosing the initial parameters of the models of populations that are being constructed.

The article presents the idea of applying Benford’s law to check the reliability of historical sources of mass character and to detect possible adulterations that could appear in scientific studies containing large amounts of numerical data. In order to verify the feasibility of implementation in historical research, the analysis has been based on one historical source, two research studies and one database. As a result of the tests, statistical material was collected and then compared with the Benford distribution for the leading number. The possibility of conducting internal criticism of mass sources was confirmed and synthetic measures were proposed as a tool for verifying the reliability of sources, in which many numerical data are present.

The article attempts to compare social structures of Russian provincial gubernial urban centers in Siberia (Tobolsk) and in the Central Black Earth Region (Tambov) in the watershed period for the Russian Empire at the turn of the 20th century. The authors have analyzed the occupational, class and social composition of Tobolsk and Tambov. Age, gender and social characteristics of occupational and urban class groups, as well as composition and specific weight of the elite, middle layers and bottom layers of the gubernial centers have been studied. The study of two gubernial cities of the Russian Empire embedded in different historical environments permits the authors to single out general and specific features of the processes of social change related to urbanization and modernization.

Based on a variety of statistical sources the article explores demographic structure and origins of migrants in the post-WWII Soviet Union, using examples of the North Caucasus and the Urals. Next to post-war general population censuses of 1959, 1970, and 1979, the research utilizes unique yearly reports of the local administration concerned with internal migration in the two areas under study. While general characteristics of the migration streams in those areas largely corroborate observations of an earlier research on the subject, the Author also unravels substantial inter-regional differences which so far have gone largely unnoticed. These differences were to a large extent path-dependent and related to peculiarities of the settlement patterns, and overall developmental differences between the regions. Given these divergences, the Author argues, a methodological reflection on the accuracy of crude comparisons of the migration streams in the regions under study seems inevitable.

The article deals with the distribution of population in the county of Proszowice (within the Voivodeship of Cracow) at the end of the 18th century based on the censuses of the Civil-Military Order Commission of the Cracow Voivodeship. The censuses in question, in spite of the fact that a few parishes were passed over, depicted the situation quite precisely. That is why it was possible to carry out an analysis not only of the overall number of population in particular places and parishes but also of the distribution of Jews, gentry and clergy. A special attention was paid to the ownership structure in the county, the surface of parishes, the density of population and the urbanisation of the county. The GIS (Geographic InformationSystem) tools and statistical methods were used in the analysis.

The article presents extramarital births in the Roman-Catholic Parish in Łąka, in the Land of Pless, in Upper Silesia. The research has been based on the existing parish registers of baptism for the years 1664–1914. In that period 839 extramarital children were born in the parish, which is 7.6% of all the births. Of those 839 children 15 were stillborn babies, which means that there were 824 baptised extramarital children. The parish registers do not contain any information on the fathers and the data concerning the social, professional and territorial background of the mothers are rather poor. The most extramarital births used to occur in Autumn and Winter (54.5%), especially in January and February (conceived in April and May). The least extramarital births used to occur in June, August and November (conceived in Autumn and Winter). Most of the extramarital children were baptised on the first day after their birth (42%). On the very day of their birth 17.8% kids were baptised. 89.9% of the extramarital children – as in the case of the rest of the kids – were presented for baptism by a woman and a man. Only 10% infants were presented to baptism by one person, usually a woman. The above presented questions have been drawn up thanks to the aggregative method. The number of extramarital births in a rural parish is surprisingly high in comparison to others within the Regierungsbezirk Oppeln. The seasonal character of extramarital births did not differ from the seasonal character of the births of other children. And neither did the procedures of baptism in the two groups.

The article presents the statistical method known as the LOESS Regression and a possibility of its application in the analysis of time series. The advantages of the methodhave been compared to the alternative techniques: the central moving average and the linear regression to calculate the trends in time. The final part of the article contains the instruction of how to calculate the LOESS Regression in the R program with the package ggplot2.

The article contains a legal analysis of the property relations resulting from the marriage of Jan Klemens Branicki to KatarzynaBarbara Radziwiłł. The events here depicted reveal that the economic success of an aristocratic family to a large extentconsisted in a skilful construction of the prenuptial agreement and later in enforcing its fulfilment.

The article contains an analysis of the process of the Polish migration to Scotland after 2004 based on quantitative and qualitative methods. Migration is described in two basic dimensions: by defining the size of the flows, i.e. the inflow and outflow of migrants, and the number of foreigners in the country in a given time. In qualitative methods the key elements are motives, migration strategy, activities migrants engage in and mechanisms of integration with the local community. Such analyses carried out in the present article have been supplemented with an introductory description of possible British sources of information. A historical background of the Polish migration to Scotland has also been taken into consideration in the article, and so has the overall British context, which was indispensable in this case, as Scotland is part of the United Kingdom.

The article deals with the question of using the censuses carried out by the Civilian-Military Order Commission of the Cracow Voivodeship as a source for demographic research exemplified by the Proszowice County. The censuses were conducted in the years 1790–1792 and were not tax character, hence they are commonly considered to be more precise and reliable than the ones conducted earlier. The article presents the specific character of the sources of that kind and the resulting difficulties such as passing over part of the population, terminological complexities, unclear division into households. A lot of attention has been paid to the assessment of the credibility of historical sources, with such indicators as the percentage of the youngest children and old people in the population or the male sex ratio in newborn babies. The analyses of age heaping has been carried out with the use of the of Whipple’s and Myers’ indexes. The conclusions indicate that the censuses – especially in the parts concerning age analysis – turn out to be a problematic sources, yet some of their short comings might be overcome when appropriate statistical methods have been applied. Frequent age heaping is not decisive factors in the credibility of the census; what should be decisive is the analysis of the whole – the amount of the information in the census, diligence and accuracy, and compatibility with other sources, e.g. the Poniatowski census of 1787.

The article has been intended to review the most important publications concerning the post-war migrations in Western Pomerania. As a result of massive migrations which took place just after the Second World War the former population of that region was almost totally replaced by a new one. The displacement of the German population, the big settlement action to attract here Polish – and other – populations, as well as later migrations starting from the 1960s are the matters that have been already researched, mainly by historical disciplines. As a result there is a rich literature.

The article is intended to present the essence of the so-called biometric model of infant mortality, which is also named the Bourgeois-Pichat model after its creator. The other aim is to discuss the computational procedure of the model and its three most important properties.

The accession of Poland to the European Union on May 1st, 2004 involved enormous possibilities for the Polish, especially in the area of free movement of persons, services, goods and capital. In addition, a gradual elimination of barriers to enter the EU’s labour market intensified migration, mainly on economic grounds, as the directions of migration were dependent on labour markets in the member states of the EU. In 2004 there were only three labour markets open for the Polish: in Great Britain, Ireland and Sweden; in the following years other markets kept opening and in 2011 the whole labour market of the EU was open for the Polish. There are many reasons that make the Polish leave the country and settle down in one ofthe member states of the EU but economic motives remain the most important ones.

Emigration is not a new phenomenon in the Polish history. It is caused by various reasons and generates some consequences from the point of view of the state and society. This assumption is reflected in the question of the Polish emigration to Great Britain after 2004, which is a challenge in the context of the Polish foreign policy and its results in the form of Polish-British relations. It should be noted that migrations, especially in its social and economic dimension, constitute an important component of foreign policy, both of the sending state and the receiving one. The aim of the article is to analyse the impact of the Polish emigration to Great Britain after 2004 on the level and character of the Polish-British cooperation. In addition, the author of the article tries to find out what factors determined Polish activities intended to protect the interests of the Poles living in Great Britain.