Household Boundaries and Kinship Networks in Historical Family Reconstitution

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The study of demographic processes in past time was greatly advanced by the adoption of family reconstitution methods using records of birth, marriage, and death, usually from parish registers. However the methodology is quite limited and ethnocentric. It rarely links persons beyond the nuclear family, and usually assumes that that family is a household. It rarely links persons beyond two-generations. It never examines the stochastic character of variant reconstitutions from the same basic data. It rarely cross-validates the reconstitution of event records by examination of census-type records such as household registers. This last failing results from the fact that household registers are composed of already reconstituted families and that if one's analytical interest is limited to the coresidential group there is no need to go further. This project is an exploratory and risky endeavor to test the optimality of family reconstitution of parish records, using c. 225,000 records of baptisms, marriages, and burials from central Slavonia, 1700-1900. This research will take advantage of ecclesiastical household censuses that are now machine-readable and can be matched to varying reconstitutions of the event data. It will also test the reconstitutions to find the reconstitution rules that achieve the best match with the censuses. The work is exploratory because it is a necessary first step toward examination of the role of kinship beyond the conjugal family and beyond the extended household. It is a significant advance in historical anthropological demography. It is risky because no one has done it, and although preliminary trials in some aspects are promising, it is not known if the cross-validation with the censuses will actually work. The intellectual merit of this proposal includes the application of a rigorous anthropological and structural-functional point of view into discussions of economic and social causality in historical demographic change. The broader implications of this proposal are that all of the underlying and processed data will be available on the Internet as a public good. The algorithms and code will be available, to be adapted by other researchers to their own datasets. This will enhance the adoption of these methods by other historical and anthropological demographers, beyond what could be achieved by ordinary scholarly publication.