Preliminary Programme

It is clear that children’s mortality risks in the past were highly clustered. Mortality risks were not randomly distributed over families. This seems to apply not only for mortality risks during the first years of life, but also for older children’s mortality risks (Janssens, Messelink & Need, 2010). This clearly suggests that it is not merely genetic factors that may be responsible for the phenomenon of death clustering. In her research on India Monica das Gupta (1990) suggested that the quality of care given to infants and small children by their mothers played an important role in the strong clustering of deaths.

In this paper I will be investigating children’s mortality risks between birth and age five in four major cities in the Netherlands that represent different stages in the demographic transition. We will be comparing the life chances of children born under varying mortality regimes, ranging from an extremely high mortality regime, to more moderate and low levels of infant and child mortality. We have rich information on various family factors that influence mortality risks, such as father’s occupation/social class, mother’s age and her total fertility history, as well as all birth and death data on the index child’s siblings. In this way we are able to reconstruct the family arena that determined most of a child’s survival chances.

References:
Monica Das Gupta, ‘Death Clustering, Mother’s Education and the Determinants of Child Mortality in Rural Punjab, India’, Population Studies, 44 (1990) 489-505.

Angelique Janssens, Maaike Messelink & Ariana Need, ‘Faulty Genes or Faulty Parents? Gender, Family and Survival in Early and Late Childhood in the Netherlands, 1860-1900’, The History of the Family. An International Quarterly, 15 (2010) 91-108. (Show less)

In 2008, the life expectancy of Dutch women was 82,3 years, whereas for Dutch men it was 78,3 years. This is not a big surprise, because we all know about the longer life expectancy women have. However, due to a number of reasons this was and is not always the case. In non-western countries today, for example, we see that women and girls in some age groups have higher death probabilities than men. Surprisingly, this was also the case in the recent history of the Western world.
These higher death probabilities for women are found in Western societies from the eighteenth century until the 1920s. For instance, in the Netherlands between roughly 1850 and 1930, girls from age 10 onwards and women in their childbearing ages suffered from this higher mortality. For the last group, this can mostly be attributed to the risks surrounding child birth. For the younger age group, however, no clear reasons have been found yet. In several European countries, studies on this subject have been performed over the last decades. These studies mostly refer to the lower economic value girls had in the family compared to boys. This could result in neglect. However, if this really was the reason it is strange that girls did not suffer excess mortality until age 10: in this period their economic value was even lower than between the ages of 10 and 20. In the Netherlands, however, we see that below age 10 boys suffered from excess mortality.
I, therefore, want to approach these sex differences in child mortality from a different perspective. I will not only examine the higher death probabilities for girls between the ages 10 and 20, but also the excess mortality of boys below age 10. Concerning survival chances of children, several studies have already shown the impact of having (no) siblings. What did it mean if you were one of the older siblings? You probably already formed strong ties with your parents and made yourself useful within the household. However, having many younger siblings might increase the burden on your shoulders when you had to go out and work. And what about having older siblings? In that case, you were born in a relatively rich family, because your older siblings also earned an income. However, you were also an extra mouth to feed. These examples clearly show that your place within the family, in other words your birth rank, could have a serious impact on your life chances. One might also wonder what it meant if you had only sisters or only brothers or if you were an only child. In this paper, I will answer these questions using unique Dutch data at the level of the individual and his or her family. It will show the decisive importance of siblings in the survival of children. (Show less)

It is undisputed that there were large differences in infant mortality between different social classes in Victorian Britain. The reasons behind these differences are, however, still not well understood; the relative roles of factors such as access to better nutrition, better sanitation, greater health related knowledge, lower overcrowding and fewer neighbourhood hazards remain to be explored. This paper will use information drawn from the information gleaned from the linked census and civil register records for two Scottish communities, one urban and one rural, over the period 1861-1901 to consider how different aspects of life associated with social class acted and interacted to hinder the survival chances of infants and young children born to parents in the lowest social strata. Data provided by the sources allow cause of death to indicate the medical conditions and disease hazards killing the children and also permit the role of parental literacy and living conditions to be examined. (Show less)

20th century and, particularly, they were key to understand mortality in big cities, with their lack of infrastructures, bad sanitation, crowding, waste disposal and other endemic urban circumstances that helped their transmission. A large body of literature has already been collected on the mortality differences according to differential infrastructures, deprivation degree of neighbourhood, family SES, etc, so the different dynamics at work in the city are quite well known. A relatively small of research, though, has been directed at the differential mortality that could be found in charity or welfare institutions, like foundling hospitals, some of which contributed largely to the death toll of the city. As institutions represented enclosed spaces were children were confined in crowded conditions and, in some cases, fed artificially, it is likely that their infectious mortality could be greater than that of the regular children of the city, involving a different cause of death structure that could also bias the actual urban children death structure. However, lack of accurate individual cause of death has not allowed to research whether there were differential mortality patterns in these types of populations. So, in order to test for the degree of similarity and explore further the urban child mortality dynamics regarding infectious disease, we propose to use the longitudinal database of the foundling hospital of Madrid (1890-1935) along with the Madrid Burials Dataset (1880-1902, 1902-1905 and 1918-1921) to study the specific contribution of infectious disease in the city and in the institution and its specific evolution over time. The information on probabilities of dying will allow us to explore specific hazards for specific diseases and link epidemics and regular mortality and its specific impact in the institution. In order to obtain homogeneous cause of death information and compare it appropriately we will use the classification by Bernabeu, Ramiro et al 2003. (Show less)

In recent times the topic of infant death (<1) and child death (<5) clustering has been strongly adressed in historical demography. In different areas, in Europe and overseas, in towns and in rural villages as well many researchers have found strong hints, that infant and child death was more or less clustered in families (cf. DasGupta 1997, Janssens e.a. 2010, Vandezande e.a. 2010, Arulampalam & Bhalotra 2008, Edvinsson e.a. 2005 etc.). This paper deals with a predominantly rural village in the country of Styria, covering the decades between the 1880ies and the 1930ies, using nominal records from the parish registers. The results are somehow different to the findings in the research named above, the clustering-effect was low. One explanation could be, that living conditions were similarly bad for most of the families, cause infant and child death was relatively high, reaching about 25% of all live-births in the outgoing 19th century. (Show less)