Preliminary Programme

The paper will discuss strategies alliances of a rural population in France in the eighteenth and the first third of the nineteenth century. The data gather families living in rural villages of the department of the Eure. It contains also the small town of Vernon, located right in the middle of these villages. Situated on a privileged axis of circulation, Vernon is a city relay between Normandy and Ile de France. The region is poor and has the characteristic of being a privileged area of abandoned children from Paris. We managed to build a rich data bank of approximately 53 000 couples (200 000 individuals) followed for more than a century (1690 1836) and covering Vernon and thirty villages (40 parishes of the old regime). Genealogical family trees of five or six generations will uncover the possible formation of kinship networks through villages. These networks will be put into perspective with land exchange networks. Matrimonial exchanges between the small town of Vernon and surrounding villages will also be considered. (Show less)

Though many studies have enabled us to understand the genesis and modes of the reclusion of the Jewish population, very few have been made about the economic, social and cultural evolution of the ghettos. Their inner running, the exact composition of the population, the social and professional stratification, the matrimonial market, the mobilities and the migratory practices are not yet known. The present work will analyze, through the concept of kinship networks, the family dynamics, the matrimonial practices, the devolution of patrimony, and the mobilities inside and outside of the ghettos, especially those of central Italia (Pesaro, Urbino, Ancona). How intermarried Jews? What is the place and role of women and uterine kinship in the networks ? Jewish marriage is it an "arab" marriage ? We will see that the relationship has played a decisive role in the formation of communities, the movement of goods and individuals, acting as a "migration enhancer". We will analyse these questions by placing the case study in a broader historiographical perspective, using the tools of social history, network analysis and the software PUCK.


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In the nineteenth century, the establishment of networks of Jewish banking houses at the European level, is often built around family. The structure of family networks can replicate the networks formed by the houses of allied banks. The proximity in terms of kinship often allowed also to maintain the capital even within the family. The purpose of this paper is to uncover the structure of alliances of these banking dynasties. The body of genealogies drawn gather the main European Jewish banking dynasties that emerged in the nineteenth century. Many of them are of German origin (Rothschild, Stern Bischoffsheim, Kann, Koenigswarter), others come from Russia (Gunzburg, Ephrussi), France (Fould, Halphen, Pereire), or of the Ottoman Empire (Camondo, Halfon). A long historical perspective will relate matrimonial strategies and changes in banking structures that emerge in Europe in the late nineteenth century. We will use the software Puck (Program for the Use and Computation of Kinship data) which, among others, sets the list of the kinds of marriages from a corpus of genealogies. (Show less)

PUCK (Program for the Use and Computation of Kinship data) is a free available software for the analysis of genealogical data. It allows to detect kinship ties between individuals included in a genealogically structured database and to describe exactly the type of relation between them. By this way, we have the possibility to test the influence of kinship on the social organization of a village or of a region, on social relations and thus on social networks within this society, when we can rely on systematic and qualitatively satisfying data about the local population. Our research focuses on an alpine valley and on two small communities in the Swiss canton of Valais. The use of the software Program for the Use and Computation of Kinship data (Puck) will allow us to explore two interesting hypothesis. (1)- the influence on kinship on certain social relations, like the purchase of land and goods or on spiritual kinship. (2) the detection of significant kinship relation or networks between families characterized by specific forms of sexual behaviour, like illegitimacy-prone groups (Show less)