Preliminary Programme

From the period of the Second Empire, Paris gathered a growing jewish population. An upper-class composed of families of french, but also german, italian, turkish or russian origins emerged from this community. The paper will explore the kinship networks of this parisian jewish upper class for a period covering a hundred years. Genealogical data of more than fifty dynasties have been collected. The intensity of the marriage links sustained by the families composing the group and the structure of these links will be observed. The networks analysis software Ucinet will be used. (Show less)

A large literature now exists about the influence of the household and family context on demographic behaviors, but at the moment very few is known about the possible interrelationships between demographic processes and the larger kin network, at least for historical populations. However, in a recent essay David Reher argued that past societies with strong or, conversely, weak family ties have little changed nowadays. Actually, in the Italian society family and family ties have always played a central role in people everyday life though migration, marriage, mortality and economic reasons could modify the network of relationships within a territory or a community.
Our purpose is precisely to assess how much influential the kin network could be on the demographic behaviors of an Italian peasant society during the 19th century. This analysis can be hardly carried out for Italian pre-unitary communities owing to the absence of continuous and reliable census sources necessary to know the composition of households and pattern of co-residence. For the little town of Casalguidi the availability of annual Status Animarum and vital registers allowed us to set up a nominative linkage between the two register types. We were therefore able to trace the year-by-year presence of individuals within different households, with further opportunity to define with precision their networks of relationships in the population. This fact enables us to check for possible differentials in nuptiality, mobility and fertility between people with and without such networks. (Show less)

In discussions about low level of infant mortality among Jews, reference is often made to the positive health consequences of the strong family-centredness among the Jewish population. At the same time, the rapid fertility decline among Jews is partly explained by the fact that the strong links between regionally dislocated Jewish families might have eased the spread of knowledge and adoption of new techniques of birth control. By using information from marriage certificates we try to find out whether a) Jews were indeed more than Catholics or Protestants characterized by a stronger orientation to kinship members
b) Jews had indeed a wider geographic network than Protestants and Catholics.
We use data from marriages, contracted in the Dutch city of The Hague between 1850 and 1902. Data relate to around 900 Jewis, 1500 Protestant and 900 Catholic marriages. The marriage certificates provide information on the social class, place of residence and kinship relationship to bride and groom of four witnesses to marriage. (Show less)