Preliminary Programme

This research uses family reconstitution to follow a population of early immigrants to colonial South Australia over three generations. By combining newspaper death notices and obituaries with civil and church registrations, electoral rolls and census records, this research seeks to identify the children and grandchildren as they disperse globally. Correlations between occupational class and geographic distribution are examined to identify whose children and grandchildren continued to migrate and to where. (Show less)

In 1605, John Hotkins, a 22-year-old collier, born and living in the parish of Clutton in Somerset, England deposed that he was ‘a workman at the Colepitts at Pensford distant from Clutton about some two miles and had his Lodging at the howse of John Raymonde in Pensford’. It was here that he witnessed Joanna Allin call Joanna Raymond (John’s wife) a whore.
In 1558, Philipp Franklyn of Lamerton in Devon also deposed that he had lived in the parish since birth, but worked in the adjacent parish of Tavistock, approximately 11 kilometres away. He too heard the word ‘whore’ uttered while he was ‘hedgyng at Shelly mylle within the parishe of Tavistok upon a certen work day’.
In 1557, Juliana Burges, a married woman of Tavistock in Devon, travelled to the parish of Whitchurch where she had previously worked as a servant to William Gooding. The purpose of Juliana’s trip was to ‘vysyt a Seke [sick] childe’ of William’s next-door neighbour.

What did ‘community’ mean to these men and women? Populations are frequently divided along parochial lines, and it is assumed that early modern social and economic life largely played out within the arbitrary boundaries of the administrative parish. Parish records create artificial boundaries of social and economic life and consequently, community becomes synonymous with the parish. Classic works such as Margaret Spufford’s Contrasting Communities and Keith Wrightson and David Levine’s Poverty and Piety in an English Village focus on reconstructing parish life in detail. While they attempt to trace familial connections across parishes through the reconstruction of kin networks, they nonetheless characterise the early modern village as self-contained. This stereotype persists in more recent scholarship.

We know early modern society was highly mobile. Quantitative studies by Peter Laslett, Peter Clark and others have focused on migration in early modern England and have charted high turnover in parish populations. However, mobility is equated with migration (change of residence) and short-term journeys or regular movement between places have been somewhat neglected. Using incidental evidence from church court depositions, this paper interrogates patterns of everyday travel and mobility to locate people’s sense of ‘community’ through the reconstruction of social and economic networks irrespective of parish boundaries. Concerned with recovering individual experiences of community, this paper moves beyond a parish/manor-centred approach and captures all types of mobility. This paper explores who made journeys and why, and where and how far they travelled. It considers the impact of gender, age and occupation in determining the types of communities individuals belonged to and the distance they travelled to participate in communities. By analysing these experiences of mobility, I seek to present a more precise and accurate picture of the geography of early modern English communities. (Show less)

In this paper we explore geographical and social mobility for two populations, prisoners and WWI soldiers born in the Australian colony of Tasmania in the period 1870-99. We link both of these cohorts to their birth certificates in order to compare the occupations of their fathers with their recorded occupations on arrest and enlistment. We also compare the place of arrest or enlistment with the place of birth in order to track geographical mobility. Many Tasmanian born prisoners were arrested in other colonies (notably Victoria). Tasmanian born recruits often enlisted in places outside of Tasmania as well. We can also use this technique to explore geographical movement within Tasmania as well, identifying prisoners and soldiers who were born in rural locations, but enlisted or were recruited in urban areas, and visa versa. We conclude by exploring the relationship between geographical and social mobility across these very different cohorts. (Show less)

Previous research shows the United States experienced a long-run decline in patrilineal kin propinquity between 1790 and 1940. Some evidence supports lower kin propinquity in urban areas compared to rural areas, but previous estimates experienced methodological limitations that made comparing rural and urban areas difficult. I use geocoded 1880 U.S. Federal census data for 39 cities representing 6.5 million people to update the urban patrilineal kin propinquity measurement. Most families with potential patrilineal kin lived within 0.5 miles of each other, approximately a 10 minute walk. Previous sequential methods overestimated potential kin within the same enumeration district by approximately three percentage points, and similar life course patterns between the two methods suggests the sequential method reliably estimates potential patrilineal kin within the same enumeration district. Preliminary results suggest lower urban kin propinquity compared to rural areas, but the differences were far smaller than previous estimates. (Show less)

Despite the fact that the taxonomy of historical populations have been the paradigm for historical family demography from early on, so far a systematic analysis of statistically derived groupings among populations with observable household formation traits has not been undertaken. In this paper we draw on a recently emerged massive repository of historical census microdata and an outburst of advanced automatic pattern recognition techniques to reconsider one of historical demography’s most pertinent research puzzles: the fiddly concept of historical household formation systems.
Using the combined North Atlantic Population Project (NAPP) and Mosaic databases of historical census microdata, a rural dataset was derived covering 12 million individuals living in 2.6 million domestic groups spread over 256 regional populations from Catalonia in the west to central Siberia in the east, between 1700 and 1926. Using this dataset, the markers of Hajnal’s 1982 household formation rules were operationalized to include a set of four variables: female age at marriage, the incidence of female premarital service, the relationship between marriage and headship attainment, and the share of nuclear households. Accordingly, these data were analysed using data mining and unsupervised pattern recognition techniques (the K-medoids clustering algorithm) in order to empirically derive the “natural groups” of populations based on similarity and dissimilarity in their household formation markers.
We show that although regional differences between European household formation systems are readily identifiable, either of the two statistically most coherent agglomeration solutions (2 and 4 cluster partitions) reveals a much more complex picture of household formation regimes than Hajnal or other researchers that followed him have hitherto been in a position to suggest. Furthermore, when regional populations cluster on similar household formation characteristics, they often come from both sides of his “imaginary line”, thus posing a challenge to any bipolar divisions of the continent. Using an unprecedented pan-European perspective, for the first time ever this paper provides sound empirical evidence suggesting that the long-lived idea of two household formation systems in preindustrial Europe masks a true variability of historical family behaviour, and therefore needs to be abandoned, or at least amended. (Show less)