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The article outlines the problems and research prospects of one of the most common legal institution that was typical of the old-Polish gentry families – the guardianship of minors, which has not been researched in the historical literature so far. The author reminds that in the ancient Polish law there were four ways of establishing the guardianship of minors, which were called: paternal, natural, official and autocratic. Each one of the four might commence only when the previous one had ceased. The author presents the most important findings made by law historians and underlines that they treat with the practical functioning of the guardianship in the reality of the 17th-century gentry of the Crown only superficially. We might familiarise with that practice thanks to other than normative sources, massive in character, namely the old-Polish last wills. In addition to establishing the guardianship, they contain many hints on how to educate and bring up minors. Undoubtedly, the most interesting question is what the guardians were actually doing. And here the essential question is whether their guardianship was good enough, whether they took care of the child (upkeep, upbringing, education) and of the child’s property. One of the objectives of the author of this article will be to present the most common activities undertaken by guardians, that is to say the ‘model’ behaviour of guardians. At the same time – wherever it is possible – it is worth attempting to present the reaction of the children to their guardians’ actions. In this context, there appears a fundamental problem of the scale and kinds of the abuses committed by the guardians, first of all concerning the minors’ land properties, including delaying the people they were in charge of entering into marriage in order to extend the period of their running their land property. An exceptionally important function of the institution of guardianship in the life of the gentry family combined with the research possibilities included in the 17th-century sources offer optimistic prospects for a comprehensive study, which would present the guardianship in gentry families and facilitate a better understanding of how the gentry family functioned in the Crown in the modern times.

The article is the first part of statistical analysis of marriage records of Jewish people from Piotrków Trybunalski for the period of 1808–1870. The author rises issues related to the age of entering into a marriage taking into consideration: social and economicfactors, permanent celibacy, prospective spouses’ origins, seasonality, and remarriage patterns. One of the most significant conclusions is the age of concluding a marriage which is the first one for both parties, it is assigned about 20 for women and 22 for men – distinctly lower than in non-Jewish urban communities in the 19th century, like in Piotrków Trybunalski. The author points out diversity in matrimonial customs among Jewish communities of Poland of that time. The statistical evidence from Piotrków Trybunalski does not provide full explanation of the observed differences. Both frequent marriages of widowers with single women, and the duration of widowhood among the group being studied fit into a model investigated in other (non-Jewish) communities, and are contrary to traditional Judaism recommendations.

The article presents the causes and spatial differences of infant mortality in eastern Prussia densely populated by the Polish, and the changes that phenomenon was subject to. The research has been carried out mainly on the numeric data juxtaposed and published by Dr Behr-Pinnow, on official statistical material (Preußische Statistik, Statistikdes Deutschen Reichs, Veröffentlichungen des Kaiserlichen Gesundheitsamts) and on unpublished archival material, first of all reports of Regierungsbezirk presidents. Infant mortality has been analysed at three levels of data aggregation: provinces, Regierungsbezirke, counties (Kreise). In the research the following devices have been used: coefficients, averaging of several years, (dis)similarity rates of structures (the reference standard – Regierungsbezirk Aurich), weighted linear regression, cartograms (grouping based on median absolute deviation). The article depicts the tendency for infant mortality in the ‘Polish’ Regierungsbezirke of Prussia, which deteriorated at the beginning of the 20th century, and a significant spatial diversification of the phenomenon in question, which was related to the way of farming (especially in the region of Żuławy Wiślane and the Vistula valley); however, the research has not provided any conclusive evidence of a link between a high infant mortality rate in the area in question and the socio-professional structure, the level of affluence or the infrastructure. On the other hand, thanks to linear regression models it has been proved that the intensity of infant mortality in counties depended on the ethnic composition to a significant degree (the faith did notplay any role). Parallel to an increase of the Polish- and Kashubian-speaking populations (those populations – it is worth mentioning – usually enjoyed lower socio-economic status compared to their German-speaking neighbours) the infant mortality rate was generally decreasing. It was at the lowest level in Greater Poland, in the counties of Kościan, Gostyn and Śmigiel (where the dominant population was Polish, Catholic and rural). All in all, it is justified to say that the Polish- and Kashubian-speaking populations that were less advanced in demographic transformation compared to their German-speaking neighbours, even before institutionalising social welfare, provided better care for babies and guaranteed a lower infant mortality rate, first of all thanks to the general and longer breastfeeding.

The article presents Jacques Dupâquier’s method to detect demographic crises on the basis of the temporal distribution of deaths in its classical and modified form, popular in historical demography. The presentation of the method based on the standardised data is a pretext for studying the programming in R (language), which is a continuation of the previous article. The element that has been highlighted is the for-loop, presented step by step. An extensive introduction is supposed to familiarise the reader with the three programming codes of the functions that compute indicators of crisis for particular years: kryzysyDem1 (the classical form of the formula), kryzysyDem2 and kryzysyDem3, a modified form that takes into consideration three temporal perspectives of the development of the phenomenon, i.e. the past, present and future ones; the final results, which satisfy the determined limit criteria, are the average value of the results obtained for the three perspectives. The presented codes of the variants of Jacques Dupâquier’s formula should – to a significant extent – facilitate the computation of indicators of demographic crises including various limit criteria.

The article presents the results of the research on the age of newlyweds, the length of marriages, the number of children in the family and life expectancy for the magnate family in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 16th–18th centuries, and the comparison of those numbers with the parameters established by West-European historical demographers for aristocratic elites from Britain, France, Germany and Portugal and the families that ruled in Europe. The demographic parameters for the magnate family have been obtained from the database that contains information on particular genealogical facts such as the date of birth, marriage and death, and the number of children (collected in library and archival queries for nine families) and they have been compared with the results arrived at by West-European researchers. The results for the magnate family indicate that the average age of men who contract marriage for the first time is included between over 23 to over 27 years; that is also the age range when European aristocrats contracted marriages, but the average age approached the upper limit more frequently. The age at which women from magnate families contracted marriage for the first time also correlates with the data concerning European female aristocrats, that is to say between 18 and 23–24, and approaches the upper limit of the interval. In the case of other parameters the magnate family were of lower value. The length of marriage in magnate families was shorter than in England, the number of children in a family also was smaller, and life expectancy was usually shorter both for men and women. When we compare the data concerning magnate families with the analogous parameters concerning the West-European elites we can see that the magnate families from Lithuania were generally less healthy. The increase of nearly all the demographic parameters in the 18th century in their case was after all inferior to the ones referring to similar social groups in England and France. There is a possibility that difficulties connected with obtaining complete data and – as a result – a less numerous research sample, as well as taking into consideration only the children that had grown to the adult age (in the West-European samples all the children that had been born were counted) have influenced the values of the parameters and made them less reliable. That is why it is a need to continue the research and to concentrate on other problems (which are important from the point of view of functioning of the family), such as the size of definite celibate in the group in question, the percentage of second and third marriages, the problem of illegitimate children, etc.

The article presents the causes and effects of the epidemic of cholera that broke out in Cracow in 1866. The presentation is based on archival material collected when the epidemic was raging and when it was over. The basic source are tabular sheets and responses to a questionnaire sent to physicians by the Sanitary Commission just after the epidemic was over in 1867. The notes prepared by Cracow physicians are a splendid source for the research of that kind as they were made shortly after the epidemic. The article also presents a description of how the epidemic was approaching Cracow and its probable route along which it reached the city. The article includes various views on the aetiology of the epidemic and on various methods of curing it. In the article there is an analysis of the mortality rate according to sexes, faith and the place of treatment. The epidemic has been depicted as it was evolving in time and space; in order to make the depiction the author has used some geostatistical methods, including the method of hierarchical clustering. The incidence of cholera and its mortality rate have been presented on two maps, on which the clusters have been marked too. According to the research, in the case of Roman Catholics the disease attacked mainly the poor and malnourished social groups, who lived in poor housing conditions or were homeless. In the Jews the disease attacked various social groups, not only the poorest. The ability to survive has been analysed in two religious groups of Cracow: the Roman Catholics and the Jews. The results have not confirmed the statistical higher resistance of the Jews to cholera, which might have been suggested by the first data of the graph. In another part of the article Cox regression has been used to verify which factor was responsible for a higher mortality caused by cholera. The method of backward (stepwise) approach has not confirmed that such factors as sex, social class, faith or place of treatment influenced the probability of death. Among those factors the most doubtful one is the place of treatment, i.e. a hospital or a dwelling place, which has been rejected in the last step of the analysis. It may be the result of the fact that the sample was not big enough. The epidemic of 1866 was relatively mild, and the city council was well prepared; it was also important that there were many highly-qualified physicians engaged in the battle against the epidemic and access to medicines was not difficult.

The article brings out a special attention paid by historians and demographers to the smallest demographic and social unit after the second world war. It resulted from the will to understand the transformation of the whole society in the past, which to a certain degree became possible thanks to the analyses of the ancient family structures, including the changes they had undergone and the trends that had been identified. Against the background of the basic achievements of the West-European historiography of historical demography, the author also emphasises a significant development of the Polish research in this sphere, yet he notices that it has been achieved mainly by the efforts of individual researchers, hardly linked to any institution. Generally speaking, in spite of some revival of the last 30 years the knowledge of the basic biological function of the family, i.e. fertility, is still not satisfactory. That is why the author stresses the need to intensify research on demographic structures of families in Polish lands from the beginning of the 20th century and presents its programme. At the same time he underlines that now some former restrictions, which somehow hindered Polish research in which L. Henry’s method was used, have disappeared. At the moment, there are no bigger obstacles to track down hundreds of register books of births, deaths, marriages and baptisms, as well as marriage records of the 19th century. What is more, in the era of laptops and other digital carriers, there are no restrictions as far as equipment is concerned; information may be collected and processed in no time. The author reminds that for the last 25 years there have appeared only a few valuable studies on the basic biological function of the family, its fertility (inter alia Cezary Kuklo, Krzysztof Makowski, Agnieszka Zielińska). The article indicates that future studies on demographic and historical statistics of the family should fall back on the research potential included in L. Henry’s method to a much wider degree. Thanks to a more common use of the method procreative attitudes of the inhabitants who lived in Polish lands before the end of the 19th century should become more wid ely known, and – at the same time – make it possible to answer the question whether the procreative strategies were conscious or not. Future investigations, according to the author, should also take into consideration the problem of mortality. In the presented research programme what has been strongly stressed is the postulate of a more detailed description of the smallest social cell through its socio-economic – as well as religious and ethnic – differentiation, wherever it is possible. The programme also takes into account the need to describe the relations between spouses and between parents and children, and other members of the ancient households.

The article presents methods of computing the size of the population in the rural areas of the Kingdom of Poland in the second half of the 16th century. As there are no sources such as censuses the assessments of the population have been carried out on the basis of indirect sources, which cannot be precise, such as registers of land taxes of the years 1578–1581; they give information on the number of mansi (a mansus, laneus, a field measurement equal to 16.8 hectares) in a village that belonged or were used by peasants, village headmen, impoverished gentry, innkeepers or were just empty mansi. In addition to that, the tax was supposed to be paid by landless lodgers (with and without cattle), craftsmen, millers, ore miners and representatives of other proto industrial professions. According to a suggestion made by Irena Gieysztorowa the authors compare the data of the tax collection of 1552 (from peasant’s households) with the chronologically closest ones of the 1560s (the land taxes), which allows to regionally differentiate the conversion factor of the number of peasant households in relation to the taxed mansi, representative also of the turn of the 1570s and the 1580s. Moreover, the authors have used the findings of historical demography of the last decades, among other things the conversion factors of the size of households of several groups of rural population. On the basis of the research on the 16th century economy the authors have established the conversion factors of how big was the demand of the farms for permanent hired workforce.

In the last quarter of the 19th century in Western Pomerania some demographic and socio-economic processes took place at the same time: stabilisation of death rate and a decrease in reproduction, an agricultural crisis and a migration fever. After pulling down the city walls Szczecin (German: Stettin) started spreading in all directions. The main objective of the research has been to grasp the process of demographic changes, which were parallel to the socio-economic development of the Szczecin suburbs, as wellas to present the effects of the accelerated urbanisation and industrialisation of Pomorzany (German: Pommerensdorf), one of the Szczecin suburbs, in comparison to neighbouring settlements, where such changes occurred not so fast or even did not happen at all. For that reason on the basis of the Register Office’s certificates a list was made, which included 1357 matrimonies contracted in the years 1875–1906 within the jurisdiction of the Gumieńce Register Office (German: Standesamtbezirk Scheune). The aggregate method has been used to determine the annual numbers of matrimonies, seasonality of matrimonies and an average age of newly-weds. The research indicates that in the years 1875–1906, parallel to an increase of the inhabitants, in Pomorzany the number of contracted matrimonies and the matrimonial rate were increasing regularly, where as the annual seasonality rate was decreasing. In more remote settlements, in Gumieńce, Mierzyn (Möhringen) and Stobno (Stöven) agriculture was dominant, the number of matrimonies did not change significantly, and the annual seasonality rate had big fluctuations from month to month.

The article presents some proposals that might contribute towards improving quality while results of statistical analyses are presented in Polish publications within history and related disciplines. According to the author nowadays there are no clear standards determining the rules of such presentations, which often leads to a limited comparability of results and makes it impossible to apply the techniques of data meta-analysis, and insome cases also leads to serious methodological errors. The proposals included in the text consists of the following postulates: 1) to inform the reader of the number of the populations and subpopulations investigated; 2) to make a greater use of statistical measures that describe the distribution of the analysed communities; 3) to standardise the convention of recording such measures; 4) to inform the reader about the size of the standard errors; 5) to apply the commonly accepted rules concerning data grouping; 6) to take into account the spatial dimension of the analysed phenomenon, which should be presented in the form of maps and plans; 7) to urge the authors of academic texts to make public their data sets.

Resuming the threads that appeared in the book recently published Rethinking East-Central Europe: Family Systems and Co-Residence in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Bern et al., Peter Lang, 2015) the author of this article presents the application of a computer micro-simulation of kin sets in the research on the demographic determinants of the structure of the residential family and the patterns of co-residence in the old-Polish era for the first time in the Polish literature. The first part of the article contains a review of the methods concerning the demographic determinants of the structure of the residential family and the patterns of co-habitation, and the essence of the experiment of demographic simulation, as well as some selected examples of its application in historical demography. For some time now this question has been widely discussed abroad (Laslett, Ruggles, Oeppen), but in the Polish literature there is no a single study dealing with that. The second part presents the source basis of the article; it is the database of the nominative censuses of 26,652 peasant households from the territories of the Crown, Lithuania and Ukraine from the end of the 18th century (CEURFAMFORM Database). The methodology of the applied micro-simulation model has also been discussed. A lot of space has been devoted to the question of the choice of outside parameters and the validation of the model, as a way to a better structuralisation of regional research on the old-Polish demography. It would be quite useful if the efforts of researchers might concentrate on fixing the necessary minimum programme for future analyses in microscale family reconstitution, so that their results would have a wider applicability in research of a higher rank (not only the one in which simulation modelling is used), and so that they would satisfy the basic requirements of comparative analysis. The third part deals with the applicability potential of the used methodology to analyse the influence of demographic factors on the co-residence patterns for old-Polish populations taken from the database CEURFAMFORM. The problem has been illustrated by presenting two current questions that are essential for historical demography of the family: the process of leaving the family house and co-habitation of various generations. The analysis shows how the combined impact of fertility, mortality and the generational overlap in their regional configurations, determining the number and category of the relatives in a given population, shaped the dominant patterns of co-habitation in the territories that have been researched. The conclusions should be treated as innovative, yet future investigations might verify that. For the time being they constitute a convenient map that indicates directions for further investigations, both quantitative and qualitative in nature.

The article presents the scale of the professional activity of women who lived in Cracow in the second half of the 19th century. The author’s intention has been to verify – at least in relation to the urban population – the common belief that before the First World War women did not take up paid jobs to a larger extent. The analysis contains the Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (HISCO). The records of censuses of 1869, 1880 and 1890 have been the main source for the analysis; thanks to them it was possible to create a database of urban inhabitants. After having analysed the changes in the size of the population of Cracow in the second half of the 19th century the author attempted to assess what the percentage of the dynamic increase of the Cracow’s population might be accounted for by immigrants, identified through their place of birth and citizenship. The incoming population changed the structure of the Cracow’s community as far as age and sex are concerned. The majority of the immigrants were young adults, mostly women, and they were l ooking for a job. In 1869 every sixth woman that lived in Cracow was working; eleven years later – every third, and after another 10 years – nearly 40% of them. Three quarters of professionally active women from Cracow were Roman Catholic, and only one quarter – Jewish. The article also presents the structure of marital status of working women from Cracow and the type of jobs they had – according to the main groups of HISCO. It has been proved that the women did not take up jobs motivated by the war crisis; at the end of the 19th century in Cracow there were more working women than in 2012 in Polish towns.

The migrations of peasants to Polish towns, which are considered inside migrations, in the pre-industrial era were intensive and similar to the ones in the countries of Western Europe. The sources prove the existence of permanent multi-generational migration networks that ensured a better start of a new life in towns for peasants, and an input of reliable workforce for towns. The migration processes slowed down in the 18th century, which was the result of the intensification of secondary serfdom, closing of villages, an economic decline of Polish towns at the expense of the gentry and an overall economic depression. All that is clearly visible in Cracow, where all the municipal registers and a significant part of birth and death certificates have survived. It turns out that towns influenced the increase of peasant territorial and spatial mobility, generated an increase of peasants’ enterprise, helped them to differentiate towards activities not related to agriculture, and weakened the feudal relations.

The article contains a review of Polish scientific literature concerning the history of women in the towns in Polish lands in the late Middle Ages. The article fulfils two main objectives: to present the state of development and directions of the analyses, and to outline new research possibilities, especially the ones offered by urban judicial records. The present scientific output of Polish medievalists proves that they are not too much interested in the role of women in the urban communities. In addition to just a few articles that deal with that problem seriously (briefly presenting many spheres of how women functioned in towns), there is a group of studies that treat the subject in a more sophisticated way. At present, the question best analysed is the legal situation of female inhabitants of towns and the problems taking place in the marital relations; the two things are closely related. The question of the professional life of women in the form of their participation in the guilds and retail trade has also been touched on. A lot of space has been devoted to the religious life of townswomen expressed in numerous pilgrimages and donations to ecclesiastical institutions. Undoubtedly, the least investigated sphere is the economic activities of women such as their participation in the credit market, the real estate turnover and commerce. The basic statistical analyses of the material that has been available in the judicial books of Warsaw, Cracow and Wąwolnica has proved their enormous research value. The urban sources (depending on the size of the town in question) offer to researchers hundreds or even thousands of mentions and records that are testimony of women’s participation in various spheres of urban life. Therefore, it is becoming possible to get an insight not only into the women’s activities in credit and real estate markets, but also into the meanders of their family life (inheritance and the like), lawsuits concerning unpaid debts and links with the criminal world. Regrettably, the urban books are still rarely explored and in most cases the quantitative methods are not used.

The article presents the question of an average size of the biological family, the household, and an average population of a house in smaller towns of Southern Lesser Poland, and from 1772 the western part of Galicia. The presented problems have been researched on the basis of narrative sources (municipal court’s registers) and quantitative sources (inventories, military conscription lists, parish registers). The author has also used the method of family reconstruction (Wojnicz); and confirmed that the desired model of the family was a simple family, which is visible in young married couples’ aspirations for independence, as well as older parents’ aspirations for providing sufficient income to survive after making over their real property. A biological family was usually composed of 4 people. Not much bigger were the Old Polish burgher households, which were composed of 4.5–5 people on average in Christian families and about four in the Jewish ones. What is more, those households were clearly smaller than the peasant ones, but the houses in smaller towns more frequently than in the country were occupied by more than one household. Servants were common in households and lodgers in houses.

The article is the second part of the analysis of Jewish marriage certificates from Piotrków Trybunalski between 1808 and 1870. The author discusses social strategies of matching spouses on the basis of the declared grooms’ and the parents’ professions in the certificates; he also takes into consideration where the newlyweds had lived before contracting marriage and afterwards in order to explore the dwelling habits and the support on part of the parents. The results of the investigations, indicating social and professional endogamous preferences and neolocality, are analysed in the demographic and cultural context of the time. In the end, the author sums up the demographic differences and similarities between the Jews and the Christians and asks a question on the role of religion, social, and economic in shaping the demographic behaviour of the Jews from Piotrków.

The article presents the methods of computing the size of urban population in the Kingdom of Poland in the second half of the 16th century. As there are no sources such as censuses the assessments of the population have had to be carried out on the basis of indirect sources, which cannot be precise. The most popular method of computing the size of urban population consists in counting the buildings situated in the town in question, which had been registered in inventory or tax sources. The authors analysing the date of the whole early modern period, especially the 18th-century Austrian registers have come to the conclusion that the value of the conversion factor should be related to the type of buildings. In the case of most Polish towns dominated by wooden buildings the conversion factor should be six people per one house. If we have the information on the number of houses, the calculations of the size of population should be carried out on the basis of the data contained in the land tax collection registers, which register the number of urban mansi and the heads of households of the population composed of craftsmen, tradesmen and landless tenants.

The article deals with demographic questions on the basis of baptism (birth) registers from eleven parishes situated in various parts of Southern Lesser Poland. A special attention has been paid to the periods when in all the analysed parishes there was a sharp and substantial decrease in births. Thus, two major crises (1714–1715 and 1735–1736) and a few milder ones (1675, 1691, 1694, 1699–1700, 1709–1710, 1732 and 1746) have been identified. A detailed quarterly observation of fecundations during the selected three crises (the first half of the 1690s, 1714–1715, and 1736–1736) juxtaposed with the quarterly prices of rye, oats, buckwheat, and peas from Cracow and Warsaw prove that they were food crises. It has been confirmed by narrative sources, which mention a severe famine in 1714–1715 and 1736–1736. Those years of famine coincided with the years when the quantity of corn sent to Gdańsk was at the lowest level in the first half of the 18th century.

The article summarises the state of research on Poland’s population in the late Middle Ages and at the beginning of the Early Modern Times; at the same time it indicates the necessity and possibility of correction of the present assessments. So far historical demographers have been concentrating on counting the country’s population at two temporal points: 1340 and 1580. In the first case they concentrated on the registers of Saint Peter’s pence, and in the other – on the tax registers. The two sources do not inform directly on the size of the population, but rather on the amount of paid taxes: per head, per household, the size of acreage or the value of property. For almost a hundred years a special methodology has been created to use those sources for the needs of demography, and in the literature there have appeared several conversion factors to assess the size of the population. In spite of all that and because of the imperfection of the source basis, a defective edition and different conversion factors applied by various researchers, the assessments of the size and structure of the population of the Kingdom of Poland in the late Middle Ages and at the beginning of the Early Modern Times that have been made so far, are not entirely satisfactory.

The years 1875–1906 saw an intensive development of the urban complex of Szczecin; the industrial, housing and social infrastructure was rapidly growing, and there wasan inflow of rural population from outside the county of Randow. The socio-economic development in the outskirts of Szczecin was accompanied by significant demographicchanges. The article presents the effects of the accelerated urbanisation and industrialisation of Pomorzany (German: Pommerensdorf) – a suburban district of Szczecin – in comparison to neighbouring towns and villages, where such changes were much less rapid or did not occur at all. That is why on the basis of the documents from the Register Office a list was made; it is a list of 1,357 marriages contracted in the years 1875–1906 in the jurisdiction of the Register Office of Gumieńce (Standesamtbezirk Scheune). Thanks to the aggregative method it was possible to measure annual numbers of marriages, seasonality of marriages and an average age of newlyweds. Within the jurisdiction of the Register Office of Gumieńce, Pomorzany was the district where the growth was the fastest: in the period in question its population quadrupled and the number of dwelling houses increased twofold. An analysis of the marriages contracted in Gumieńce revealed that the inhabitants of that district were the youngest newlyweds in the jurisdiction of the Register Office of Gumieńce and the difference of age between bride and groom was the smallest (2.2 years). The inhabitants of Gumieńce, Mierzyn (Möhringen) and Stobno (Stöven) contracted marriages when they were much older, and the difference of age between bride and groom was bigger (2.8–3.8 years). Also the preferences of the newlyweds depended on their social and professional position. Craftsmen, labourers and their daughters contracted marriages at the youngest age, owners of farms and farmers’ daughters – at the oldest age.