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Copyright of Quarterly of the History of Material Culture / Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej is the property of Instytut Archeologii i Etnologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Current article deals with the family in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, with special focus on legitimacy in the town of Paracatu between 1761 and 1849, a region scarcely touched by historiography. Historical sources include the legal codes on the family published in the Constituições Primeiras do Arcebispado da Bahia and in the Phillipine Ordinations, and especially in the baptism registers of the parish of Paracatu. Discourse Analysis is employed to question the norms and their employment and to understand the working strategies of a society seeped in slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current analysis focuses on weddings and baptisms in the parish of Nossa Senhora da Conceição de Albuquerque, province of Mato Grosso, Brazil, prior to the Paraguay War (1864-1870). The war is generally considered a watershed in regional historiography even though few studies are extant on the southern frontier with Bolivia before 1864. Research shows that activities existed in the parish featuring complex social and family relationships among the inhabitants, reported in ecclesiastical records such as wedding and baptism registers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the results of research on the customary amount of time between birth and baptism in Lancashire, England, from the mid-17th century to the early 20th century. It is based on the records of 68 Anglican parishes, which provide continuous annual data for that time frame. It was found that birth to baptism intervals were stable during the 17th century, but began to increase in later centuries. Factors which affected baptismal timing are discussed. These include epidemics, which tended to shorten the interval, or increases in population, which generally lengthened it.

This article analyzes the possible usefulness of the baptismal and marriage registers to sociologists in the U.S. Parish records constitute a rich, although, oddly enough, a relatively unexplored source of data for the social scientist. Every Catholic parish must maintain certain official records on parish life. The general law of the Church imposes on each pastor the obligation of recording all baptisms, confirmations, marriages and deaths in his parish, in addition to maintaining up-to-date census information on his parishioners. As of 1958, Catholic sociologists are reasonably familiar with the possibilities of parish and census and survey material for research purposes. There is one technical possibility not usually emphasized, that is, an up-to-date parish census that provides the social investigator with a made-to-order option for sampling purposes. Whatever the defects of the usual parish census information, these records can be invaluable in that they provide names and addresses for Catholic household units. The procedure proposed is only applicable in parishes with reasonably stable populations. Unfortunately for research students, entries in both the baptismal and marriage books are listed in chronological sequence, not according to families. Baptismal entries for the children of a particular set of parents do not appear together in the register but are spread throughout it. Name indexes, commonly attached to each baptismal and marriage book, are useful in locating the scattered members of each family, yet considerable detailed labor is still required of the investigator in reconstructing family genealogies.

The "Brandywine" population of Southern Maryland is a tri-racial hybrid group which manifests many of the physical and social characteristics common to other known isolates located throughout the eastern part of the United States. This paper will be concerned only with the mate selection behavior of group members for the period 1820-1956, with special emphasis on their endogamous-exogamous marriage patterns. The analysis which follows is based on marriage information contained in the written records of nineteen separate parishes in Charles County, Prince Georges County, and the southeast section of the District of Columbia. The discussion which follows is based, however, on only 1752 marriage records. The author has no reason to believe that these exclusions biased the results significantly. Baptismal records are used here only in a supplementary capacity. Some of the interpretations proposed later in the paper are based upon the writer's interview experience with members of the group, as well as upon the data from church records. On the basis of the evidence presented it can be predicted that the Brandywine group will very probably remain a racial "island" for some time to come. As an island it will continue to be linked by the bridge of intermarriage with the mainland on both sides, i.e. with African Americans and whites.

The article focuses on changes in the methodology and scope of population history before census taking was commonplace. It states that Anglican parish registers in England recorded baptisms instead of births and burials instead of deaths which allowed estimates of the totals of events but that birth and death rates would have a wide margin of error due to a lack of periodic counts of at-risk populations. It mentions that French historian Louis Henry developed the technique of family reconstitution in the 1950s-60s, which used record linkage to determine the life histories of all the members of a family through individual birth, marriage, and death records. It comments on the use of computers in family reconstitution to create demographic histories of communities.