Preliminary Programme

Environmental stress (wars, natural disasters, epidemics, economic and political upheavals) causes deterioration of family functioning. Moreover, living in an underprivileged family environment, which involves, among others, death of a parent (mainly father), can increase stress exerted on the offspring. According to the theory of psychosocial acceleration, stressful environment often accelerates the transition from adolescence to the stage of reproductive life. On the other hand, paternal death reduces the economic support for a child and can decrease the child's standard of living (lack of parental resources), which in turn might postpone the child's entry into matrimony, especially when the offspring marriage required parental funds.
This work examined the relationship between parental loss (maternal/ paternal/ both) in childhood (<15 years) and the acceleration of the first marriage of a child, i.e. if parental loss at early childhood affected earlier marriage probability in offspring or not. Individual courses of lives of women and men from the city of Pozna? have been taken into account. The collected data include also information on individual’s SES (occupational status, parental professions, religious denomination, etc.). All data have been derived from the domicile files of the Municipal Records of Pozna? residents.
It is expected that in the 19th and early 20th centuries the death of a parent accelerated the entry of the offspring into adulthood, including his/ her matrimony. In historical populations marriage was essential for the onset of reproduction that is why the work can contribute to better understanding of fertility and family dynamics and their causative factors. (Show less)

First, the presentation will outline what makes the originality of the approach of a human population unit by its metabolism as a descriptive and analytical model of its own socio-demographic dynamics and of its history.
The population unit concerned in our example is made up of Korean families of farmers - accountants by tens of thousands from 1840 to 1905 then by hundreds of thousands of individuals after 1905 - segments of villages and rural communities including the villages then in the search for new arable land favorable to flooded rice cultivation where gradually and progressively settle in village units while very faithfully following the layout of the local hydrographic network to supply new land still to be cleared.
These peasant populations then advance from the north of the kingdom of pre-modern Korea across the Sino-Korean border line of a Manchu Empire at the end of its life (1644-1912) on lands and territories located on the geo- politically very exposed and weakened of the Chinese North-East and as progresses and increases on an imperial China, of metabolism still largely bureaucratic and agrarian, the pressure of new colonial empires of urban-industrial metabolisms (Russia and colonial Japan in particular).
The presentation will be documented in such a new perspective from a very abundant Korean-speaking research literature and in particular the works of native researchers and descendants of the rural communities concerned as well as researchers from other Korean diasporas around the world (Koreans - Americans, Koreans from Japan, Koreans from Russia, Koreans from Central Asian countries ...) without forgetting the important and very enterprising South Korean research literature. (Show less)

Marriage patterns in the Gypsy population were determined by the degree of sedentarisation (the sedentary Gypsy population -- with small differences if the settlements had mixed population, or were completely Gypsy--, and the semi-nomads); by the type of owner (the monastery Gypsies had a greater number of cohabitations, due to the observance of kinship and prohibition to marry; marriages between Gypsies belonging to different owners); abduction of the girls or mutual agreement of the two, without the consent of the parents. The paper will try to reflect each of these patterns in the Gypsy sibling co-residents from early Nineteenth century Wallachia. (Show less)