The Demographic Data Base (DDB) at the Centre for Demographic and Ageing Research (CEDAR) at Umeå University has since the 1970s been building longitudinal population databases and disseminating data for research. The databases were built to serve as national research infrastructures, useful for addressing an indefinite number of research questions within a broad range of scientific fields, and open to all academic researchers who wanted to use the data. A countless number of customised datasets have been prepared and distributed to researchers in Sweden and abroad and to date, the research has resulted in more than a thousand published scientific reports, books, and articles within a broad range of academic fields. While there has long been a clear predominance of research within the humanities and social sciences, it has always been used for research in other fields as well, for example medicine. In this article, we first give a brief presentation of the DDB and its history, characteristics, and development from the 1970s to the present. It includes an overview of the research based on the DDB databases, with a focus on the databases POPUM and POPLINK with individual-level data. A number of major traits of the research from 1973 to now have been outlined, showing the breadth of the research and highlighting some major contributions, with a focus on work that would have been very difficult to perform without data from the DDB.

This article discusses différent aspects of migration and health in Swedish 19th century urban environments. The décliné in urban mortality set in during the last decades of the century, at the same time as Sweden rapidly became more urbani-zed. The relation between population increase and mortality was however not that clear. The article analyses mortality among migrants in comparison with the more permanently resident population in two Swedish towns-Sundsvall and Linköping. People with another origin than the town of Sundsvall had much better survival than the others. A possible explanation for this is that the migrants were brought up in a much healthier environment than those that spent their childhood in the urban environment, and that the better health in adulthood partly was a resuit of these long-term effects. For illegitimate children, however, their mother's back-ground as migrants had a negative effect. The unmarried migrant mother's lack of social network and support made the survival of their children low.

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Our study aims to find how disability affected human health in historical time through an examination of individuals' mortality risks and death causes. Swedish parish registers digitized by the Demographic Data Base (DDB) enable us to account for a relatively high number of persons reported to have disabilities, and to compare them with a group of non-disabled cases. The findings concern a 19th-century population of 35,610 individuals in the Sundsvall region, Sweden, and show that disability increased the premature mortality risk substantially. Disability seems to have jeopardized men’s survival in particular, and perhaps due to gendered expectations concerning the type of work men and women became less able to perform when disabled. Our study of death causes indicates that their deaths were less characterized by infectious diseases than among the non-disabled group, as a possible consequence of lower exposure to infections due to the way in which disability could impede opportunities for interaction with peers in the community. In all, our mortality findings suggest that disability was associated with poor living conditions and limited possibilities to participate in work and social life, which further tend to have accumulated across life and resulted in ill health indicated by premature death.

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