Preliminary Programme

Infant mortality in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, during the first twenty years of the twentieth century has not been studied from a demographic or social point of view. Some papers point to situations of death in the state, but the reality about the causes of death of children under one year of age are unknown during a period when the civil war started in 1910 and continued at the end of the decade.
Infectious, parasitic and respiratory diseases accounted for the majority of the victims, as well as the effect that the nutritional status of the inhabitants had on the before mentioned diseases. In addition, it is worth noting the high infant mortality rate, leading to low life expectancy. Another topic is the Spanish influenza pandemic where we do not know how it affected children under one year of age.
This paper is an approach to exploring infant mortality in the period 1918 to 1920 in the state of Veracruz, which in 1910 had a population of 1 132 856 inhabitants, dispersed in 3 330 localities, many of them were rural and difficult to access, because of the geography and the social and political situation with civil war.
There is a lack of systematic records during the period 1917 to 1919 for many of the localities, so the main objective is to estimate the range of possible infant deaths in the state of Veracruz, generalizing the infant mortality rates of a rural and urban municipality to the state level for 1918 and 1921. In addition will be obtained the causes of infant death. The source of information shall be the death and birth certificates of the Civil Registry. (Show less)

Over the next couple of years we shall get access to transcriptions from all the records in the Norwegian church records with baptisms, weddings and marriages ca 1800 to 1935. This will give new possibilities for studying among other demographic topics child mortality in the period when mortality rates in the towns improved to become lower than in the countryside. This paper will prepare for this research on the national level by using the not insignificant number of records we already have to launch topics and research questions of interest. (Show less)