POPULATION HISTORY: RECENT CHANGES AND CURRENT PROSPECTS.

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.