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This study tries to shed light on the way in which family characteristics affected the survival of children in nineteenth-century European societies. Insights from recent epidemiological studies were used to construct a framework via which the absence or loss of one of the parents could affect the health and survival of children. The review not only showed how important family structure was for survival of children, it also provided insight in the differences in the roles played by fathers and mothers and indicated that the wider kinship network is a factor that is of great relevance in studying the effects of family structure on living conditions of children. Current research focuses on the relationship between religion, health, and mortality in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries; social-class and gender differences in mortality; and the current social and demographic situation of the Jews in the Netherlands.

Cet article présente une étude régionale et sociale des fluctuations saisonnières du mariage aux Pays-Bas, à partir des actes de mariage relevés pour une vingtaine de municipaliés entre 1812 et 1912.On commence par examiner les statistiques publiées qui sont disponibles par province et pour l'ensemble des Pays-Bas, puis on procède à une analyse plus détaillée selon les groupes socio-économiques et les régions. Il en ressort que deux facteurs fondamentaux interviennent dans les différences de saisonnalité des mariages observées entre provinces et groupes sociaux: ce sont les contraintes ecclésiastiques et les variations de la saisonnalité du travail. Pour mesurer avec précision l'impact des interdits émanents du droit canon, on a suivi une procédure qui tient compte des variations détaillées, d'une annee sur l'autre, des périodes d'interdit. Dans les régions catholiques, il n'y a pratiquement pas de différences de comportement selon les groupes socio-économiques dans le respect des périodes interdites; il est clair que les variations régionales ne sont que la marque des différences de confession religieuse dans la population. Au cours de la période étudiée, les effets de la sécularisation ne sont pas encore sensibles.L'idée d'un modèle 'continental' de la saisonnalité du manage est mise sérieusement en doute: le fait d'éviter les manages de mai, trait qui était jusqu'à présent considéré comme une caractéristique majeure du modèle européen, ne concerne en réalite nullement les Pays-Bas, non plus que l'Allemagne, l'Angleterre ou la Belgique. Nous pensons que la popularité des mariages de mai reflète l'adhésion a un rythme de travail saisonnier bien caractéristique et lié a l'importance de ce mois dans les coutumes folkloriques.

"The impact of religion on family and reproduction is one of the most fascinating and complex topics open to scholarly research. The linkage between family and religion has received no systematic treatment on a comparative basis, either in the social sciences or in historical studies. This book provides new insights into the relationships between religion and demography during the crucial period of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Apart from providing a wealth of descriptive information on family life and fertility in different national and religious settings, the major strength of the book lies in its conceptual insights. The book will attract and stimulate readers at the advanced undergraduate or at the graduate level in history, religious studies, women's studies, family studies, social demography, sociology, and anthropology due to its subject matter (moral issues related to fertility decline and family change played an important role in processes like secularisation, and religious secessions in the19th and 20th century), its analytical approach (all chapters make use of micro-level data on family and family size and use comparable statistical methods specifically suited for these kinds of data), and its theoretical orientation (the chapters explicitly focus on the variety of mechanisms via which religions had an effect on family life and fertility). The book is truly cross-cultural, showing the similarities as well as the differences in the positions of the various churches on matters important for reproduction in Western Europe, the US and Canada in the period 1850-1950. The consideration of the causes of variations in family size in the past provides a refreshing perspective on contemporary effects of religion on reproductive behaviour and the family. ""This volume successfully promotes an agenda for research on the complex and diverse historical relationships between fertility, identity, community and religion."" Simon Szreter, Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge ""These well-researched and lucidly argued papers will provide important reading for all those interested in the religious history of the nineteenth century."" Hugh McLeod is Professor of Church History at the University of Birmingham ""This is a very valuable new resource for scholars, both established and new, to understand the role of religious institutions in family and demographic behavior and the ways in which those behaviors change across long periods of time."" Arland Thornton, Director, Population Studies Center, University of Michigan ""This book shows also that modern demographic and social history is able to revive the past in ways unthinkable only a generation ago."" Massimo Livi-Bacci is Professor of Demography, University of Florence, and honorary president of the ""International Union for the Scientific Study of Population""."

AbstractThis paper shows the effect that the medical expertise of medical practitioners had on the life chances of their children. We focus on infant and early childhood mortality. We reconstructed the life histories of the offspring of a group of around 2800 medical practitioners who were practicing in a high-mortality region in the Netherlands between 1850 and 1922, the period during which infant and child mortality in the Netherlands underwent the largest changes. The survival of their offspring is compared with that of a random sample of children from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands. Multilevel hazard analysis, using Cox proportional hazards models with shared frailty, is applied to study the effect of belonging to the medical profession on survival, in relation to the level of infant mortality in the regions where children were born. Within the group of medical practitioners, attention is paid to differences in children's survival according to the level of medical knowledge of the fathers. Our statistical analyses show that the offspring of medical practitioners as a whole did have better survival prospects than children born to families without a father with a medical background. When medical practitioners had effective medical knowledge, measured by the period of graduation and the highest level of medical training reached, the positive effects on the survival of their children were even stronger.

AbstractThis study uses a unique historical GIS dataset compiled from birth, death, and population register records for infants born in the city of Amsterdam in 1851 linked to micro‐level spatial data on housing, infrastructure, and health care. Cox's proportional hazards models and the concept of egocentric neighbourhoods were used to analyse the effects of various sociodemographic characteristics, residential environment, water supply, and health‐care variables on infant mortality and stillbirth. The analyses confirm the favourable position of the Jewish population with respect to infant mortality as found in other studies and show the unfavourable position of orthodox Protestant minorities. Infant mortality rate differences are much smaller between social classes than between religions. The exact role of housing and neighbourhood conditions vis‐a‐vis infant mortality is still unclear; however, we ascertained that effects of environmental conditions are more pronounced in later stages of infancy and less important in the early stages of infancy.

AbstractPrevious studies of the fertility decline in Europe are often limited to an earlier stage of the marital fertility decline, when the decline tended to be slower and before the large increase in earnings in the 1920s. Starting in 1860 (before the onset of the decline), this study follows marital fertility trends until 1939, when fertility reached lower levels than ever before. Using data from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN), this study shows that mortality decline, a rise in real income, and unemployment account for the decline in the Netherlands. This finding suggests that marital fertility decline was an adjustment to social and economic change, leaving little room for attitudinal change that is independent of social and economic change.

Since the process of assimilation of Jews coincided with a fertility transition, this study examines the relation between changes in the household structure of families of Jewish origin and the process of assimilation. Data were gathered from the Amsterdam registry for 717 Jewish descendants born in Amsterdam between 1883 and 1922. Our research shows a decrease in average number of siblings at birth among successive birth cohorts. Moreover, especially those persons born outside the Jewish district had a significantly smaller number of siblings at birth. This result might indicate that the fertility transition among Jews started with families who had left the Jewish district. This study also shows that subjects who had a higher number of siblings produced more children themselves, whereas those who married a gentile had fewer children.