Preliminary Programme

The presentation will focus on the differences in the approach to remarriages among Catholics and Protestants in Poland in the 18th century. The analysis will be based on data from parish registers of Catholics and Protestants from two capitals of the Polish-Lithuanian state: Warsaw and Vilnius. The demographic analysis will be preceded by a presentation of theological and doctrinal views of Christian denominations on repeated marriages. (Show less)

High adult mortality in premodern societies was a factor that in a given case had multiple effects on the life course of all family members. The surviving parent had to cope alone with the difficulties of childrearing, farming or other sort of working, let alone the emotional shock of losing a spouse. On the other hand, especially young children’s pure survival might have been at stake or elder siblings had to take part in work at a larger extent or had to leave the parental household (to marry or to enter service) in order to ease the burdens of the household head. It could also happen that an adult child’s marriage or leaving the parental household was delayed by the early death of one of the parents. All in all, the effects were considerable for everyone, but their strength depended on many factors: the sex, the social position or wealth of the lost parent, the age, sex and number of the children, the composition of the household (the presence of other relatives or servants). Similarly, the intention of the surviving partner to remarry might have been general but also depended on different conditions: the age at widowhood, sex, age and sex of children, social position, etc. Moreover, the different factors could be in many times contradictory as they could mutually counterbalance the impacts of each other.
In our paper we aim at studying the determinants of remarriage in a multi-ethnic microregion of 19th century Hungary. It consisted of two Roman Catholic German villages and a very close Calvinist Hungarian village. We reconstruct the individual life courses of the local population on the basis of the parish records. In our study we analyse the likelihood of remarriage among widowed people by using event history analysis, where the main co-variants will be sex, age at widowhood, duration of widowhood, socio-economic status, the number, age, sex and marital status of children. While the parish records used can make possible to consider the birth, death or marriage of children in this respect, the series of surviving household lists in one of the cases (the village Zsámbék) can reveal the actual composition of the households of the widowed persons and its impact on their chances of remarrying. All these effects will be analysed in a region so far less studied where several ethnic and denominational groups lived together with very different customs related to marriage or inheritance. (Show less)

The paper investigates the effects of parental loss and the effect of remarriage of the surviving spouse on child survival and marriage prospects of orphans in a Hungarian rural town. A database for the analysis come from records of the parish registers of Keszthely, a small rural town from Western Hungary from the period 1750-1849. The family reconstitution database has been linked to yearly tax records and postmortem inventaries, in order to reconstruct socioeconomic status and wealth of individuals. The occupational information of household heads from tax registers are used. (Show less)

The paper will focus on the phenomenon of remarriage and stepfamilies among members of Bohemian political administration who were in office between 1848 and 1918. Its aim is to find out how frequently the said phenomena occurred in these strata and to what extent their occurrence was influenced by demographic changes in the second half of the 19th century (increasing life expectancy). The main focus will be on the social position of prospective partners and strategies used by members of the new elites to find a new partner. The study will also attempt to find out whether and how the social backgrounds of the first and second (and possibly subsequent) wives differed. The purpose of this analysis will be to establish to what extent marriage strategies were used as a catalyst of a professional career or, conversely, whether a successful professional career manifested itself in the choice of a second partner. Other aspects of family relationships will also be dealt with – especially children born into the individual marriages. The obtained results will be compared with usual behaviour patterns of the population at large. (Show less)