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The BALSAC database, developed since 1971, contains data on the Quebec population from the beginnings of European settlement in the 17th century to the contemporary period. Today, BALSAC is a major research infrastructure used by researchers from Quebec and elsewhere, both in the social sciences and in the biomedical sciences. This paper presents the evolution and current state of the database and offers a perspective on forthcoming developments. BALSAC contains marriage certificates until 1965. Coverage is complete for Catholic records (80 to 100% of the population depending on the region and the period) and partial for the other denominations. Birth and death certificates from all Catholic parishes have been integrated for the period 1800–1849 and work in underway for 1850–1916. All the records entered in BALSAC are subject to a linkage process which, ultimately, allows the automatic reconstitution of genealogical links and family relationships. The basic principle has remained the same since the beginning, namely to match individuals based on the nominative information contained in the sources. The changes made in recent years and the resulting gains are mostly related to IT advances which now offer more flexibility and increased performance. Future perspectives rest on the diversification of the sources of population data entered or connected to the database and, as a corollary, by continuous optimization of data processing and linkage procedures. In the era of 'big data', BALSAC is gradually moving from a historical population database to a multifaceted infrastructure for interdisciplinary research on the Quebec population.

English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837 was important both for its scope and its methodology. The volume was based on data from family reconstitutions of 26 parishes carefully selected to represent 250 years of English demographic history. These data remain relevant for new research questions, such as studying the intergenerational inheritance of fertility and mortality. To expand their availability the family reconstitutions have been translated into new formats: a relational database, the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) and an episode file for fertility analysis. This paper describes that process and examines the impact of methodological decisions on analysis of the data. Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen, and Schofield were sensitive to changes in the quality of the parish registers and cautiously applied the principles of family reconstitution developed by Louis Henry. We examine how these choices affect the measurement of fertility and biases that are introduced when important principles are ignored.

The Programme de recherche en demographie historique (Historical Demography Research Programme) (PRDH), founded in 1966 and based at the Departement de Demographie of the Universite de Montreal, has since its inception featured a central project, a family reconstitution database of Quebec’s Catholic population from 1621 to 1799 named the Registre de la population du Quebec ancien (Population Register of Historic Quebec) (RPQA). This article, which marks the fiftieth anniversary of the project, explores the development of the RPQA over the five decades in the context of similar international databases, explains the current state of the database as well as our record linkage methodology, describes an important collaboration now underway to build a larger Quebec historical data infrastructure, outlines new and renewed international collaborations, and summarizes research conducted using these data as well as future research possibilities. The particular geographic context, historical development and ...

Among the population of the Krummhorn region (Ostfriesland, Germany) in the 18th and 19th centuries, the death of the father in the family led on average to the accelerated marriage of his children. Three evolutionary explanations are offered for this "paternal absence" effect in the literature: namely, (i) the assumption of an adaptive "psychosocial acceleration" of the children with prepubertal experience of uncertainty; (ii) an opportunistic adjustment of life and reproduction decisions as an adaptive reaction to the personal cost–benefit balances that are changed by the father's death; and (iii) given the genetic parent–offspring conflict, an increase in the reproductive autonomy of offspring after the loss of the dominant father figure. Our models, which are based on the analyses of the vital statistics data derived from church registers and tax rolls and compiled into a family reconstitution study, attribute the greatest explanatory power for the patterns found in the Krummhorn to the opportunistic adjustment approach (ii).

This article focuses on the history of an Afro-descendant family over its seven generations in one region of Minas Gerais. Although it is notoriously difficult to trace families founded by slaves, this one is an exception: it has proved possible to trace this family over a century and a half, and with a remarkable level of detail, because its members mostly stayed in one place. The implications of their permanence go beyond mere genealogy or family reconstitution to challenge long-standing historiographical perspectives. Over the years many scholars have agreed that Brazilian colonial and early imperial society was characterized by the near-constant movement of all segments of the population. New frontiers opened by agriculture, ranching, and mining attracted some members of the elite, but also beckoned the less favored with new opportunities. This incessant movement has even been touted as an impediment to the advancement of family history in Brazil.

Family reconstitutions have been undertaken only rarely in urban settings due to the high mobility of historical urban populations, in both life and death. Recently Gill Newton has outlined a methodology for the reconstitution of urban populations and we applied a modified version of this method to the large Westminster parish of St. Martin in the Fields between 1752 and 1812, a period that posed particular difficulties for family reconstitution because of the rapid lengthening of the interval between birth and baptism. The extraordinary richness of the records for St. Martin in the Fields made it possible to investigate burial and baptismal practices in great detail, and the extent and impact of residential mobility. We found that short-range, inter-parochial movement was so frequent that it was necessary to confine the reconstitution sample to windows in which families registered events at a single street address. Using birth interval analysis and the frequencies of twin births it was possible to demonstrate that the registration of birth events was fairly complete, but that many infant and child burials were missed. These missing burials probably resulted from the unreported export of corpses for burial in other parishes, a phenomenon for which we had considerable evidence. The limitations of family reconstitution in this highly mobile and heterogeneous urban population is discussed and we demonstrate some checks and corrections that can be used to improve the quality of such reconstitutions.

While records on historical population are available and do exist, the fact that they are so limited in nature is a critical problem. We applied the method of family reconstitution to a Korean household register to deal with these limitations. Based on family reconstitution from five successive registers, we calculated women's age at first childbirth for each social status in two ways: “observed woman's age” at first childbirth = woman's current age–age of her first child, and “estimated woman's age” at first childbirth, which uses linear regression analysis on the basis of positive association between women's age and the age of their firstborn. Our results shed light on the effects of social status and cultural factors on the age at which women in pre-industrial Korea bore their first child.

The results of a study of a nationally representative sample of disabled children and controls are presented. The findings suggest that although, at any one time, families containing a disabled child are not no more likely to be one-parent families, disabled children do appear to be more likely to experience a spell in a one-parent family at some time in their lives. Where these spells occur, they are of longer duration than for the general population, which suggests that family reconstitution may be more difficult where a disabled child is present.

Il n’est pas facile de mesurer ni de caractériser les mouvements migratoires, encore moins quand ils concernent les populations du passé. Le présent texte propose à cet effet une méthode inédite fondée sur les familles reconstituées à partir des registres paroissiaux saguenayens. Utilisant les biographies individuelles et familiales, cette méthode permet d’étudier séparément les mouvements d’immigration et d’émigration. Dans le cas du Saguenay, et probablement de toute autre région à fécondité et mortalité élevées, elle permet par ailleurs de fixer la date des migrations à un moment peu éloigné de la première ou de la dernière apparition dans le fichier des familles., Measuring migration is not an easy task, particularly in historical demography. This paper uses a new approach, based on families reconstituted from the Saguenay parish registers. Making use of the individual and family biographies, this method allows for a separate analysis of inmigration and outmigration. In the case of Quebec's Saguenay region, and probably in the case as well of any region experiencing high fertility and mortality rates, the method allows also to determine the date of migration at a moment which is close to the first or the last entering in the family file., No es fácil de medir ni de caracterizar los movimientos migratorios y aun menos cuando se trata de poblaciones del pasado. Este texto propone para ello un método inédito basado sobre la reconstitución de las familias, a partir de los registros parroquiales del Saguenay. Utilizando las biografías individuales y familiales, este método permite estudiar separadamente los movimientos de inmigración y de emigración. En el caso del Saguenay y posiblemente en cualquier otra región con una fecundidad y una mortalidad elevadas, éste permite además determinar la fecha de las migraciones en un momento no muy lejano de la primera o ultima inscripción en el fichero de las familias.

The homeostatic method, which was developed to reconstruct the number of inhabitants of a city or even a country in pre-statistical periods, has yet to receive much attention from demographic historians. Applied first to Amsterdam during the years from 1586 to 1865, the method has subsequently been used to compute the population of other places, including England from 1541 to 1871. The author reviews major schools of thought in historical demography and shows that the homeostatic method, with its emphasis on fertility regulated by marriages, logically extends some schools and is both simpler and more accurate than others. He then explains the method in detail, applying it to Dutch and English cases, and compares its estimates with those obtained through the use of other techniques.

Afin de retracer l'évolution de la population montréalaise de 1840 à la fin du siècle, les auteures ont recueilli toutes les données se rapportant à douze patronymes dans les registres d'état civil (baptêmes, mariages et décès) et les recensements nominatifs. L'échantillon a été conçu de manière à permettre d'établir les mariages et filiations et de reconstituer intégralement quelques centaines de familles représentatives des trois principales cultures en présence : les Canadiens français, les anglo-protestants et les Irlandais catholiques. Chaque groupe a une structure par âge, des trajectoires de vie et des comportements démographiques spécifiques., To trace the evolution of the population of Montreal from the 1840s to the end of the century, we collected all baptisms, marriages, deaths and nominal census entries for 12 sample surnames. The sample is intended to permit matching, chaining, and a full reconstitution of several hundred families representative of each of the city's three principal cultural communities: French Canadian, protestant, and Irish catholic. The three communities functioned as distinctive subsystems, each with its own age-structure, vital rates, and behavioral patterns., Para describir la evolución de la población de Montreal desde 1840 hasta fines de sigio, las autoras recolectaron todos los datas asociados a doce apellidos en los registros del estado civil (bautismos, casamientos y defunciones), asi corno los censos nominales. Se concibió el muestrario de manera a poder asentar casamientos y filiaciones, y asi reconstituir integralmentevarios centenares de familias representativas de las très comunidades culturales principales de Montreal: Canadienses franceses, anglo-protestantes, e Irlandeses católicos. Cada una de estas comunidades tiene su propia estructura por edad, sus propias trayectorias de vida y sus propios comportamientos especificos.

The two most effective ways of converting parish register data into estimates of fertility, mortality, and nuptiality in the past are generalised inverse projection and family reconstitution. In general, they produce reassuringly similar results for England in the early modern period. An earlier version of inverse projection, using aggregative tabulations from 404 parishes, was employed to generate the demographic estimates presented in the Population history of England , while, 16 years later, data from 26 parish reconstitutions formed the basis for the findings published in English population history from family reconstitution . The more refined measures produced by family reconstitution have enabled some of the input parameters used in inverse projection to be specified more accurately, and this in turn has led to minor modifications in the results obtained from the aggregative data, but, whether the original or the modified parameters are used, comparison of the output from the two methods suggests that both yield the same ‘big picture’. Nevertheless, reconstitution has brought to light many previously unknown or obscure features of English population history, some of which are simultaneously illuminating and puzzling: illuminating because they enforce a revision of the received wisdom; puzzling because, although the existence of an unexpected pattern can be demonstrated, its explanation is unclear. The bulk of this essay is devoted to a possible explanation of one of the new findings of reconstitution, the rise in marital fertility which took place during the eighteenth century, for which no satisfactory explanation was offered in English population history . In a concluding section, the possible links between economic circumstances and population growth are discussed.

Anglican parish registers have been the basis for most studies of population trends and characteristics in early modern England, and one of the most important of the techniques used in analysing them has been family reconstitution. But Anglican registers at all times were an incomplete and inaccurate record of vital events, and their defects tended to become more pronounced in the later part of the period during which they afford the chief source of empirical information about population behaviour. And there are inherent limitations and biases in the results that can be obtained by family reconstitution. This article attempts to describe the range of difficulties and dilemmas involved in studying the demography of populations in the past when using this source of data and this technique of analysis. A variety of tests is deployed to establish the degree of reliability attaching to the results obtained in a recent exercise based on the family reconstitution of 26 parishes, and more generally to assess the opportunities open to scholarship in this area and the pitfalls associated with such work. The conclusion is that reliable results can be obtained but that great care is needed in the selection of suitable registers, and that a number of tests should be employed to monitor the internal consistency and the demographic plausibility of any findings.

Illegitimacy in a historic, single community at Penrith, Cumbria (1557–1812), has been studied using aggregative analysis, family reconstitution and time series analysis. This population was living under extreme conditions of hardship. Long, medium and short wavelength cycles in the rate of illegitimacy have been identified by time series analysis; each represents a different response to social and economic pressures. In a complex interaction of events, the peaks of the cycles in wheat prices were associated with rises in adult mortality which promoted an influx of migrants and a concomitant rise in illegitimacy. The association between immigration and illegitimacy was particularly noticeable after the mortality crises of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Children of immigrant families also tended to produce illegitimate offspring. Native and immigrant families responded differently to extrinsic fluctuations, and variations in their reproductive behaviour were probably related to access to resources.

Age-at-marriage estimates from family reconstitutions may be biased downward when they are based only on marriages of people who continue to live in their parish of birth, because when the probability of migrating rises with age, younger people are selected in preference to older ones. Micro-simulations show that the bias can have dramatic effects. In this paper French-Canadian data are used to investigate the importance of the bias and to verify empirically the micro-simulation results. Although a high proportion of people moved between birth and marriage, the bias had virtually no effect, given the specific characteristics of the migrations. If one cannot avoid discussing the timing of migration before marriage, when measuring age at first marriage using only data on “stayers”, it is just possible that in most settings, it is the same for those who lived in their parish of birth, and those who had moved.

Preliminary research on the history of family and demography among Czechs and Slovaks in the pre-modern period suggests that these central European peoples shared both western and eastern charcteristics, but also that results depend very much on the geographical location of the community being analyzed, on its nationality composition, and its socio-economic characteristics. Using internationally accepted analytical techniques such as family reconstitution and household-structure analysis, research continues on a wide range of sources such as ecclesiastical registers, household listings, and the population sources known as status animarum.

II est admis que l'un des grands bouleversements advenus dans les sociétés du passé est la baisse de la fécondité à la fin du XIXe siècle et au début du XXe siècle, et pourtant nous ignorons presque tout des antécédents immédiats de la transition de la fécondité pour l'Angleterre. Cet article, qui emploie la reconstitution des families, examine les structures de la fécondité légitime dans trois paroisses rurales contiguës du comté de Kent, pour la période 1800–1880, a travers une analyse graphique des âges au mariage, des taux de fécondité légitime, des niveaux de fécondité naturelle et des indices visibles de limitation des naissances. Ces résultats contestent dans bien des cas les connaissances démographiques courantes. Ils suggèrent que, pour la campagne anglaise, le régime de fécondité naturelle n'était pas aussi homogène que Ton croyait et que le déclenchement de la transition démographique doit être avancé des années 1870 aux années 1830. Ce travail ne conteste pas la réalite d'un changement démographique rapide à partir des années 1880, mais il suggère que l'idée commune d'un changement de mentalité et de comportement brutal dans les années 1880 doit être repensée.

Ruggles has shown that, if marriage and migration are independent phenomena, age at marriage estimates derived from family reconstitution studies can be misleading because those who marry late are more likely to have migrated before marriage than those who marry early. Marriage age estimates based on ‘stayers’ will therefore be lower than would be the case if ‘leavers’ were also included. Whether this was true of English reconstitution data, however, is an empirical rather than a logical question. Evidence from the Census of 1851 suggests that the mean age at marriage of ‘leavers’ was very similar to that of ‘stayers’ (i.e. that marriage and migration were not independent phenomena). But, though age at marriage was much the same in the two groups, the proportions ever marrying were very different: celibacy was far commoner among ‘stayers’ than among ‘leavers’.

Partant des aspects démographiques de la proto-industrialisation, on examine le processus de transition qui mène soit à une industrialisation réelle, soit au contraire à un retour aux travaux des champs. Deux villages des Pays-Bas sont etudies à cette fin, situés dans la région de Twente, où domine une industrie textile enracinée dans l'agriculture. L'organisation de Pagriculture subit au début du 19e siècle des changements structurels, accompagnés d'une intervention de l'Etat dans l'économie régionale, avec pour conséquence un boom du tissage à domicile, ce qui, dans certaines communautés, conduit à l'industrie mécanisée et dans d'autres au contraire à un retour à la terre. La reconstitution des families permet à l'auteur de suivre le comportement démographique tant à l'époque de la protoindustrialisation qu'après, suivant l'un ou l'autre processus d'évolution. II s'avère que ni la proto-industrialisation, ni l'industrialisation, ni le retour à la terre n'ont, dans les deux villages étudiés, d'influence profonde sur le comportement démographique. II n'y a en effet pas de différences spectaculaires quant à l'âge au mariage ou à la dimension de la famille complète, entre groupes professionnels ou entre communautés; il n'y a pas non plus de changement majeur en ce domaine au long de la période étudiée.

The population of Japan during the period 1721-1846, generally speaking showed decreases in northeastern area, stayed level in the central area, and increased in the southwestern area. The decrease in the northern area is thought to be attributable primarily to deteriorating natural conditions. In eastern and central part of Japan where the economic development was greatest and proportion of urban population was highest, nobody has ever spoken of any reason for stagnation of the local populations. This chapter examines migration in Nishijō Village, Ampachi County, in the Province of Mino. This is combined with a conventional static demographic analysis of the village and family reconstitution. The object is to show the significance of migration as found in this village. This chapter discusses the migration of labor, not migration for marriage or adoption. Both kinds of labor migration to be dealt are expressed in the term dekasegi.Keywords: dekasegi; demographic analysis; economic development; family reconstitution; labor migration; Nishijō village; pre-industrial society; urban population

Computerized data linkage techniques and their application to family reconstitution work concerning the period 1608-1765 in Quebec are reviewed. Plans to expand population registers using marriage records are also described. (ANNOTATION)

In this paper changes in reproductive behavior [in Finland] during the historical fertility transition are studied. The data which consist of 1594 family histories of women born between 1830 and 1909 have been collected by family reconstitution technique from the registers of a Finnish parish (Virolahti). Special indirect techniques which have been devised for reconstitution data are applied to detect the presence of family limitation and the behavioral background of natural fertility. (EXCERPT)

In the absence of vital registration, studies of the onset and early phases of the fertility transition in North America have been seriously hampered and yet the seemingly early timing of the decline, the multi-ethnic nature of the population and continuous flow of immigrants from Europe suggest that North America has much to offer to this debate. This paper is primarily methodological drawing on parallel data for the city of Montreal and surrounding region. By reconciling cross-sectional census measures of fertility using the own-child methods (1901) with those derived from a longitudinal ten-year panel (1891-1901) using family reconstitution, it exposes some of the weaknesses and the potentials of the two methods most often currently used and the advantages of combining methods. Own-children measures of marital fertility are seriously affected by significant local differences in infant survival between rural and urban areas and between cultural groups as well as by residual effects of duration and timing of marriage, while small-scale longitudinal studies in complex environments cannot always render reliable results for all sub-populations not can they necessarily be 'scaled up.' They suggest that national and even regional averages of fertility may conceal large diversity, which in turn raises questions about the existence of any single transition with uniform characteristics and timing, or universal cause. Instead we argue different groups in different environments may actually have been fine-tuning their fertility behaviour to compensate for the differential effects of mortality through adjustments to both marriage and fertility within marriage.

Studies on population history are often based on incomplete records of life histories. For instance, in studies using data obtained from family reconstitution, the date of death is right censored (by migration) and the censoring time is never observed. Several methods for the correction of mortality estimates are proposed in the literature, most of which first estimate the number of individuals at risk and then use standard techniques to estimate mortality. Other methods are based on statistical models. In this paper all methods are reviewed, and their merits are compared by applying them to simulated and to seventeenth-century data from the English parish of Reigate. An ad hoc method proposed by Ruggles performs reasonably well. Methods based on statistical models, provided they are sufficiently realistic, give comparable accuracy and allow the estimation of several other quantities of interest, such as the distribution of migration times.

Louis Henry, a French demographer, made significant contributions to the analysis and measurement of demographic phenomena and to population modeling, particularly in the area of fertility, where he focused on the physiological factors and the determinants of natural fertility. He is credited with developing the basic methods used today in historical demography, including family reconstitution.

English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837 is the most important single contribution to English historical demography since Wrigley and Schofield's Population History of England. It represents the culmination of work carried out at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure over the past quarter-century. This work demonstrates the value of the technique of family reconstitution as a means of obtaining accurate and detailed information about fertility, morality, and nuptiality in the past. Indeed, more is now known about many aspects of English demography in the parish register period than about the post-1837 period when the Registrar-General collected and published information. Using data from 26 parishes, the authors show clearly that their results are representative not only of the demographic situation of the parishes from which the data were drawn, but also of the country as a whole. Some very surprising features of the behaviour of past populations are brought to light for the first time.

Using a family reconstitution study the biology of the plague in Penrith, Cumbria in 1597/8 is described in detail; it was an explosive epidemic that spread rapidly within families and 606 individuals died of the plague, some 40% of the population. The age-specific mortality corresponded with the calculated age structure of the population and infection appeared to be random. The sex ratio of victims was 1.37 females to 1 male. The plague spread from the northeast via Richmond and then exploded in the Eden valley, appearing almost simultaneously in Penrith, Kendal and Carlisle. The details of the epidemics and the location and the climate of these widely separated small market towns show that bubonic plague was not the causative agent, and the possibility that anthrax was responsible for the drastic mortality is briefly considered. The population rapidly built up after the plague, largely by immigration and not by increased fertility, and steady-state conditions were re-established within 5 years and continued for 150 years. This severe mortality crisis of the plague had a profound effect on the population at Penrith, triggering long wavelength oscillations in both baptisms and burials in this population living under marginal conditions and maintained in steady-state by density-dependent factors.