Preliminary Programme

The geographies of poverty and poor relief under the new poor law are conventionally understood through quantitative methods – by the mapping of local or regional relief expenditures – or by qualitative micro-studies. From these we have an overall picture of high and low spending poor law authorities and of numbers of paupers, alongside detailed accounts of local conditions for a sample of places. These can give an impressionistic idea of patterns of generosity or parsimony on the part of the relieving authorities. However, this picture does not take into account the views of the paupers subject to the relief regimes being described. This paper argues that the pauper perspective must be a key component of any understanding of relative generosity. It proposes a novel application of GIS through the marrying of quantitative and qualitative data, including pauper letters, outdoor relief allowances and workhouse inspection reports, to create and map an index of generosity for each poor law union in England and Wales. This will not only provide a new means of understanding and analysing the experiences of paupers at different places and times, but will also exemplify the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods in historical GIS.
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The Digitising Scotland (DS) project aims to digitise the 24 million vital events record images for all people in Scotland since 1855. This will allow research access to individual level information on some 18 million individuals, a large proportion of those who have ever lived in Scotland between 1855 to the present day. In this paper we present the methodology for geocoding 24 million historical addresses in Scotland from 1855 to 1974 by introducing the Historical Address Geocoder (HAG-GIS) and its matching algorithms implemented for the needs of the DS project. The overall matching process links the historical addresses to the contemporary addresses by exact and fuzzy matching algorithms. More specifically, we report the results of a pilot study which carried out to determine the cut-off point in fuzzy matching so that all addresses whose matching scores are above a certain membership to be determined as a match. Those unmatched addresses are manually identified and geocoded to the appropriate grid reference using historical maps. In addition to geocoding the historical addresses, we are producing pseudo registration district boundaries using the pilot historical addresses from death event records in 1950 and 1951. This way we create a historical geographical dataset where new insights into the Scottish geographies of the past are available. (Show less)

We will approach the use of spatial analysis to the study of mortality in 19th-century Venice. At that time, Venice was one of the largest Italian cities, with about 160,000 inhabitants. In the 1870s, crude mortality rates were among the highest in Europe, and second only to those of Naples in Italy. Database core is a longitudinal data set, drawn from the population registers and made up by the life course of about 30,000 inhabitants, who lived in five different Venetian parishes from 1850 to 1869. The database reports also the addresses where these people lived in the period under study and their changes along time. Such data are being integrated in a geographic information system (GIS) based on contemporary digitized maps of the Catasto. Ideally, for the twenty years from 1850 to 1869 one can follow up the daily life of a large population sample, setting it in its spatial, environmental and socioeconomic contexts. Information on death cause was drawn from the city registers of deaths, which were kept regularly since 1811. These registers were expected to record all deaths which happened in the city, and reported the date and time of death, the name, age and address of the deceased, the cause of death, the length of sickness, the name of the physician who signed the death certificate. On the one hand we will build on observations and analyses carried out at the individual level, but also trying on the other hand to reconstruct the features of the mortality regime in its global dimension into the city. However simply breaking down mortality into its components will not be enough aims at combining together different level approaches, the decline of urban mortality, a key factor in the demographic transition, should be considered as a systemic process, rather than as the outcome of single or few, separate factors. We can resort to death records in order to approximate the incidence and association of different diseases, highlighting the presence of comorbidities, or pathologic clusters, characterizing both urban spaces (spatial clusters) and social groups (social clusters). Furthermore, to enhance our understanding of urban mortality regimes, we will carry out a comparison between two different years: 1854 and 1869. The first was marked by a dramatic socioeconomic crisis, with mortality rates soaring at unprecedented levels; the second was more representative of “regular” times. Through this comparison, we ask whether the spatial patterns of mortality varied significantly, and how, in normal and hard times. (Show less)

Research for some years on the city of Martigues (Bouches-du-Rhône, in the South of France) has enabled us to constitute an important onomastic database, focusing on the first quarter of the XVIIIth century, and to combine it with the cadastre of the city, entirely reconstituted from fiscal data (land registers) of the same period, describing the four confronts of properties. Converting this textual information in cartographic one enable us to create an Historical Geographic Information System (H-GIS) for the city intra-muros. The analysis of parish registers, census and land registers gives us socio-demographical, fiscal and epidemiological information, for both individual and household levels.
Previously, we focused on paleoepidemiology, analyzing the spatial distribution of the last severe plague wave which reached South of France from 1720 till 1722 (Séguy et al., 2005). Such a H-GIS, unique in France for the moment, also allows us to study and to modelize ways of contamination and diffusion of other epidemics; so we characterized an unknown disease which had affected a large number of young children in 1705 (Séguy et al., 2013).

Here, we aim to pool geographical and paleoclimate information with the socio-economical microdata we got (size and composition of households, social and occupational groups, fiscal categories, real and declared value of urban properties), in order to draw up levels and patterns of population’s vulnerabilities: socioeconomic vulnerability, as well as to environmental hazards. Since socio-economical level and health status are linked, our objective is to map urban areas according to their vulnerability levels to the sanitary hazards (scarcities, epidemics).

In Modern times, Martigues was an important city of Western Provence, fest in competition with the Marseilles city for maritimes and fisheries activities till the end of the XVIIth century. Then, the city of Martigues went into an economical and demographical decline throughout all the 18th century. According to census (1702 and 1716), Martigues intra muros had of about 6,000 inhabitants (and a few hundreds in its large extent lands).
The city of Martigues presents three interesting peculiarities for studying the link between natural environment, socio-economical level and vulnerability to sanitary hazards:
- First, its topography: established at the end and on the banks of the Caronte channel, which connects the Mediterranean Sea to the marshy Etang de Berre.
- Then, its urban and political organization: composed of three districts, independent before being united in a single community at the end of the XVIth century. Each parish had strongly preserved its identity.
- Finally, the segmentation in high marked sociological groups, within which differences of power and income are clearly visible.
We also chose this city because of its large and well preserved corpus of historical documents for medieval and modern times; which allows varied and interdisciplinary studies.

References
Séguy Isabelle, Bernigaud Nicolas, Tzortzis Stéfan, Biraben Jean-Noël, Bringé Arnaud, Davtian Gourgen, Signoli Michel. 2005. La diffusion spatio-temporelle d’une épidémie de peste en Basse-Provence au XVIIIe siècle. In: Berger Jean-François, Bertoncello Frédérique, Braemer Frank, Davtian Gourgen, Gazenbeek Michel (dir.), Temps et espaces de l'homme en société, analyses et modèles spatiaux en archéologie. Antibes, APDCA Editions, p. 171-174.
Séguy Isabelle, Bernigaud Nicolas, Arnaud Bringé, Michel Signoli, Stéfan Tzortzis. 2012. A Geographic Information System for the Study of Past Epidemics: The 1705 Epidemic in Martigues (Bouches-du-Rhône, France). Canadian studies of population, 39, 3-4, p. 107-122. (Show less)

An important feature of demographic change over the last 150 years are drastic changes in paternal and maternal age at first birth. Since the end of the Golden Age of Marriage in the Mid-20th century, most regions of the developed world have witnessed drastic increases in age at first birth. This trend is of concern as existing research shows that advanced parental age has negative effects on offspring health. Although parental ages at first childbirth and their consequences have been well studied, few studies have investigated the evolution of paternal and maternal mean ages at child birth over time. We use data on fertility from Sweden, Finland, Germany, and The Netherlands from the 19th and 20th centuries and apply spatial analysis methods to fill this knowledge gap. Preliminary results indicate that, in contrast to parental ages at first childbirth, parental mean ages at childbirth have not changed particularly dramatically. One reason for this is the reduced family size in modern societies. In most contemporary European population parents are older when starting reproduction, but younger when stopping. (Show less)