Re-introducing the Cambridge Group Family Reconstitutions

Abstract

English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837 was important both for its scope and its methodology. The volume was based on data from family reconstitutions of 26 parishes carefully selected to represent 250 years of English demographic history. These data remain relevant for new research questions, such as studying the intergenerational inheritance of fertility and mortality. To expand their availability the family reconstitutions have been translated into new formats: a relational database, the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) and an episode file for fertility analysis. This paper describes that process and examines the impact of methodological decisions on analysis of the data. Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen, and Schofield were sensitive to changes in the quality of the parish registers and cautiously applied the principles of family reconstitution developed by Louis Henry. We examine how these choices affect the measurement of fertility and biases that are introduced when important principles are ignored.

Mortality, migration and epidemiological change in English cities, 1600–1870

“…Instead, demographic historians rely for the period 1541-1837 principally on Anglican parish registers of baptisms, burials, and marriages (which were required to be kept by law from 1538). These can be used to reconstitute families and to calculate age-specific mortality and fertility rates, a technique known as family reconstitution ( Alter et al, 2020 ; Wrigley et al, 1997 ). These painstaking reconstructions have been used in conjunction with back-projection from early censuses by Tony Wrigley and colleagues at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure to generate robust estimates of the size and age structure of the English population between 1541 and the nineteenth century.…”