Historical Life Course Studies is a leading journal in the field of historical population studies, published in full Diamond Open Access by the International Institute of Social History (IISH). As the flagship journal of the European Society of Historical Demography, it provides a premier platform for cutting-edge research into the dynamics of human populations across time and space. The journal features both quantitative and qualitative studies that deal with such topics as partner choice, marriage, fertility, social mobility, migration and mortality from a historical life course perspective. In addition to empirical studies, Historical Life Course Studies welcomes also innovative methodological papers, database descriptions and comprehensive literature reviews.
European Historical Population Samples Network
Sources and Databases on Mortality and Morbidity in Finland, 1750–1950
This paper examines both the use and untapped potential of historical sources on mortality and morbidity in Finland. From the late 1600s, Lutheran priests recorded individual deaths, while causes of death were added on the historical sources from the mid-1700s. The Tabulation office compiled annual aggregate statistics on deaths by age, sex and cause of death based on priests' reports from the mid-1700s until 1900s. These records constitute one of the world's earliest national statistics. After the introduction of mandatory medical death examinations in 1936, causes of death were classified using national codes and later the International Classification of Diseases. In addition to mortality, various sources describe morbidity and epidemics. Annual reports from physicians and hospitals include patient statistics, individual observations, and epidemic analyses. Additionally, forensic materials, such as autopsy reports, detail unnatural deaths. Most burial records before the mid-1900s have been transcribed into accessible databases such as HisKi and Katiha. However, the multilingual nature and evolving understanding and terminology in causes of death pose classification challenges. To address this issue, this study discusses on the first attempt to apply the Historical International Classification of Diseases (ICD10h) to Finnish- and Swedish-language records, facilitating comparisons of causes of death before the 1900s. Although Finnish mortality sources have been used to some extent in historical and population studies, they remain an underutilized resource for comparative research. This article aims to raise awareness of these rich sources, exploring their origins, structure, and content, advocating for their broader application in historical, demographic, and epidemiological studies.
Copyright (c) 2026 Sara Luostarinen, Iida Lahtinen, Saara-Maija Kontturi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A Database of Causes of Death Based on Parish Registers from the Borderlands of Present-Day Slovakia. The Case of Detva Parish, 1861–1885
The article analyzes a database of causes of death compiled from individual parish registers for the town of Detva located in the present-day territory of Slovakia. The database covers the period from 1861 to 1885 and contains 9,600 entries. The town and its environs reflect the population of the seventh-largest settlement in Slovakia, which ranged from 10,000 to 12,000 inhabitants during the period under study. The population was 97% Catholic and predominantly Slovak-speaking. The article presents the motives for creating the database, the methods used to construct it, and the specific features of the parish registers from which the data were drawn. After construction, a basic classification of causes of death was performed according to the HistCat methodology. Across the entire database, the most common reasons for death came from infections, accounting for 25% of the total. The second most common category was diagnoses classified as ill-defined, with a 12.3% share, and the third most common category was tuberculosis (11.8%). These results confirm that the diagnosis of diseases displayed evident shortcomings, especially since the cause of death was not determined by a doctor, thus presenting new interpretative challenges.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jan Golian https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cause-of-Death Statistics in Sweden During the Finnish War 1808–1809. The Wegelius Journal From Röbäck Hospital
This article examines cause-of-death statistics in Sweden during the Finnish War of 1808–1809 through an in-depth analysis of the so-called Wegelius Journal from the military hospital in Röbäck, near Umeå. Kept by the physician Jakob Esaias Wegelius, the journal constitutes a rare and detailed individual-level source documenting admissions, diagnoses, medical outcomes, and deaths among soldiers treated during the final phase of the war. The study situates the journal within the broader Swedish tradition of population registration and mortality statistics, particularly the work of Tabellverket, while emphasising its complementary character as a source based on contemporaneous military hospital records. The historical context is the large-scale evacuation of sick and wounded soldiers from Finland to northern Sweden in the autumn of 1808, which overwhelmed local infrastructure and resulted in extremely high mortality. The journal contains more than 1,100 admission records from soldiers belonging to over 30 Swedish military units, many from the eastern parts of the realm that after the war became Russian-ruled Finland. Analysis of the material shows that epidemic diseases, especially typhus and dysentery, accounted for the majority of illness and death, far exceeding battle-related injuries, although war wounds were more common among those early admitted. A central contribution of the article is its detailed description of the digitisation process. The handwritten journal was transcribed, structured, and standardised into a research database while preserving the original content of the source. Dates, regimental affiliations, and diagnoses were harmonised, and medical terminology was mapped both to the historical disease categories used by Tabellverket, the Swedish agency responsible for population statistics, and to the ICD10h classification system for historical causes of death. An additional category was introduced to better identify combat-related injuries to the Tabellverket categories. The digitised database enables fine-grained analyses of military morbidity and mortality during the crisis. As such, it makes the Wegelius Journal readily usable for research in fields such as historical demography, military medical history, and historical epidemiology.
Copyright (c) 2026 Elina Nordung Omnell, Erling Häggström Gunfridsson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Tracing Mortality in 19th-Century Albanian Provinces. Parish Registers and Death-Causes in Shkodra and Jubani
Tracing vital events in the 19th century across Albanian provinces is a complex research endeavour related to the organisation of Albanian population into three different communities (Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox) under the Millet system applied in the Ottoman Empire, which grouped population by religion rather than ethnicity. The registration of births, deaths, and marriages was the responsibility of the respective religious communities, and as a result, the methods, regularity, language and quality of these records vary. This study draws on archival sources from the Central State Archives in Tirana, mainly from the Shkodra Archdiocese collection, to analyse how deaths among the Catholic population were reported and registered. We analyse the accuracy and reliability of the registers, and the main causes of death as recorded in the registers, combining the data with other official sources, especially sources regarding epidemics of the 19th century in Albanian territories. These documents provide evidence not only of how the state classified deaths and responded to mortality crises, but also of how shortages of medical personnel affected the implementation of legislation.
Copyright (c) 2026 Gentiana Kera, Enriketa Pandelejmoni, Siegfried Gruber https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Household-Anchored Record Linkage in Ottoman Population Registers. A Dynamic Tolerance Protocol for Low-Information Administrative Proto-Census Data
Ottoman population registers are often treated as sources suited primarily to static description. This article argues that their longitudinal potential depends less on data quality than on methodological choice. Drawing on three consecutive registers (1831, 1837 and 1841) from a rural village in Ottoman Anatolia, the study reconstructs individual trajectories using a household-anchored linkage protocol. Moving away from purely deterministic matching, this approach adopts an informed, guided probabilistic strategy to provide a method that is both flexible and rigid, prioritising household continuity and adaptable age progression. The analysis uncovers structured, age-specific attrition patterns, which hints at substantive life-course interruptions rather than problems with the source or the matching procedure. Specifically, the differentiated trajectories observed across life stages during the mid-1830s are consistent with a period of demographic stress, demonstrating the capacity of these registers to function as dynamic sources for historical demography.
Copyright (c) 2026 Yunus Emre Çakır https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Causes of Death in Late Imperial Ekaterinburg, Russia. Burial Records, Database, Analysis
The end of the 19th century saw marked changes in Russia's demography. However, it was still a traditional society experiencing universal marriage and high birth and death rates. This paper analyzes mortality in Ekaterinburg, an early industrial city in the Urals, expanding rapidly economically and demographically in the late 19th century. We focus on the deaths registration system, who decided and grouped the death causes, what factors affected the procedures, and how we can use the main death causes to understand health conditions in late imperial Russia. We used Ekaterinburg Orthodox parish death records between 1860 and 1919, transcribed into the URAPP database, to analyze how the system of death registration including death causes, developed then. The Ekaterinburg clergy keeping the parish registers took on this task seriously: more than 99% of the death records contained death causes. Our analyses show that diagnosis precision depended on the parish staff, even though their medical knowledge was mostly inadequate. We used the ICD-10 system to encode death causes, distributing them between 15 main groups. As a result, we could identify 88% of all causes of death in our dataset. The most common among adult Ekaterinburgers were infectious diseases, tuberculosis claiming most victims. The second and third most common killers were fever with unspecified etiology called Goriachka and "old age". Since Goriachka declined along with an increase in respiratory diseases and tuberculosis death rates, the latter was likely the real cause, but disguised obsoletely as Goriachka. The diagnostics improved during the late 19th-early 20th century, when the revised nomenclature required a more professional and modern approach. We plan to extend our research after 1920 to study the centralized Soviet system. The social differentials we found between the city's parishes will be explored with new variables. Finally, to make the research more compatible, we plan switching to ICD-10h.
Copyright (c) 2026 Elena Glavatskaya, Dmitry Bakharev, Elizaveta Zabolotnykh, Alexandr Bobitsky https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Church Death Registers as a Source for Researching Causes of Death Before and During World War I. The Case of the Parish Church in Dračić (Serbia)
This paper analyses the causes of death among the inhabitants of villages belonging to the parish of the church in Dračić, in the Valjevo region, during the period 1909–1918. The main source is the church death register, whose entries are grouped according to broad categories of causes of death. The aim is to show, through the example of a rural parish in western Serbia, the research potential and limitations of church death registers for the study of local mortality patterns. Special attention is paid to the comparison of two five-year subperiods: 1909–1913, treated as a predominantly peacetime, baseline comparative period before World War I, and 1914–1918, the period of World War I. Although 1912 and 1913 were years of the Balkan Wars, they are analysed within the broader pre-war pattern of local mortality, since the fighting did not take place on the territory of the parish and did not decisively change the structure of causes of death. The results show that epidemic diseases were the most important cause of death both before and during World War I, while direct war-related deaths formed a separate but incompletely recorded category. The paper highlights the possibilities and limitations of using such sources in historical-demographic and epidemiological research.
Copyright (c) 2026 Vladimir Krivošejev https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Historical Irish cause-of-death data have been digitized to varying standards, and while digital copies can facilitate greater access they are not research ready. Having suffered enormous destruction over the centuries through fire and inadequate storage, Irish records are very fragmented in nature, and under-registration occurs within extant data because of poor state/subject relations and confessional differences. To reconcile absences and provide a fuller impression of historical cause-of-death, we contend that it is important to create life courses from all data types. This paper traces the development of Irish mortality data and discusses our efforts to render machine readable and interoperable data from death registration records and two decennial census datasets using innovative Low-Code/No-Code (LC/NC) solutions. Our methods and approaches will be particularly interesting to countries struggling to create Free, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data from legacy datasets that adopted a partial index linked to a PDF or Tiff of original handwritten sources.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ciara Breathnach, Rachel Murphy, Marco Krumrey, Daniel Sami Mitwalli, Sebastian Teumert, Tiziana Margaria https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Deaths and Statistics. Discovering the Dead of the East Africa Campaign of the First World War
This article reassesses mortality in the First World War East Africa Campaign by foregrounding newly recovered cause of death evidence for African soldiers and labourers, many of whom were historically omitted from named commemoration. It situates these findings within the commemorative and administrative frameworks of the Imperial/Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the recent CWGC Non-Commemoration Programme. Drawing on dispersed death lists, theatre casualty returns, and — most significantly — service records and casualty cards of the King's African Rifles (KAR), the study outlines how digitisation, transcription, and the collation of data enable systematic analysis of wartime mortality. The resulting datasets confirm that disease overwhelmingly outweighed combat as a cause of death and identify leading killers including pneumonia, smallpox, dysentery, malaria, and cerebro spinal meningitis, with temporally concentrated peaks linked to operational movement and epidemic dynamics (including late 1918 influenza). Beyond correcting the historical record through improved commemoration, the article argues that these sources offer rare demographic and public health insights for colonial East Africa, opening new avenues for military, epidemiological, and social historical research.
Copyright (c) 2026 George Hay, John Burke https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Mapping the Roots of Healthcare Inequalities in Post-Unification Italy. Geographical Accessibility and Territorial Disparities
The distribution of healthcare infrastructure has historically influenced health inequalities. Consequently, geographic accessibility — the alignment between facility locations and population distribution — is crucial to mitigating these disparities. In Italy, territorial inequalities have persisted since unification (1861), and have been exacerbated by delayed public health investments. While regional disparities in healthcare infrastructure have often been linked to mortality differences, accessibility remains a neglected issue of study due to data limitations. This study aims to address this gap by using data from the Inchiesta delle Condizioni Igienico Sanitarie del Regno d'Italia (1884–1885) to study healthcare access. The study uses a two-dimensional framework, encompassing availability, defined as the number of facilities, and spatial accessibility, which is measured by travel distance and geographic barriers. Adopting an ego-network approach incorporating altitude and distance provides an updated and more sophisticated study of inequalities in access to primary and institutionalized healthcare services, identifying potential origins of persistent inequalities.
Copyright (c) 2026 Giulia Corti, Emanuele Fedeli https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Addressing health. Collecting and coding causes of morbidity from the United Kingdom, 1860–1908
This article describes the creation of a new dataset on historical morbidity. The data derive from 26,500 United Kingdom Post Office pension records covering the period 1860–1908. Each of these forms contained information on the health of a postal worker applying for retirement. This information took the form of a cause of retirement, often medical in nature, and a table providing the number of sick days taken in each of the ten years prior to their retirement. The article describes the source in detail before covering the means of digitisation from imaging through transcription, checking and coding. It details some of the recent publications using this dataset before concluding with some suggestions for future research and comparative work.
Copyright (c) 2026 Harry Smith, David R. Green, Kathleen McIlvenna, Nicola Shelton https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Aragonese Socieconomic Inequality at Death Database (ASIDD). Studying Mortality Changes Since the 1870s in a Population of Approximately one Million Individuals
Aragonese Socioeconomic Inequality at Death Database (ASIDD) is an ongoing project. Once finalized (expected in early 2029), it will contain mortality data for approximately 65% of all individuals who died in the Aragón region (Spain) between 1874 and 1994, primarily sourced from burial records. The project consists of two subprojects: one covering the period 1874–1939 and the other covering the period 1940–1994 (which is expected to be completed by the end of 2026). Aragón comprises 731 municipalities — ranging from small settlements to the city of Zaragoza (ca. 700,000 inhabitants) — with diverse geography, climate, and levels of development, spread over nearly 50,000 square kilometers. The database will include anonymized information on nearly one million individuals, including date and place of death (and often origin), age, sex, marital status, and presence of descendants at death. For about 75%, socioeconomic status is available, approximated through occupation and literacy, or that of close relatives. Additionally, for a representative sample of 30 urban, semi-urban, rural, and almost-depopulated localities, cause of death is known for nearly all individuals, based on civil registers and parish records. For each locality, information on access to health and emergency services is also available. ASIDD aims to enable the study of social inequality in mortality during the modern era, providing valuable insights into the determinants of health disparities.
Copyright (c) 2026 Francisco J. Marco-Gracia, María Pilar Rodrigo Val, Judit Gil-Farrero https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
"Searching for a Needle in a Haystack". The Intricacies of Sources on Causes of Death, Their Interpretation, and the Construction of a Database for the City of Poznań, 1830–1900
The administrative regulations introduced by the partitioning powers were enforced in the Polish lands under Prussian, Russian, and Austrian rule. These regulations included the methods of vital statistics registration, the language in which entries were recorded, and the types of data collected. Differences in registration pose significant challenges for contemporary researchers attempting to unify these records. Additionally, questions arise regarding the credibility and reliability of the registrations, which varied across the territories of the three partitions. Prussia had by far the most advanced statistical system. Strict adherence to deadlines for reporting marriages, births, and deaths, by both officials and ordinary citizens, undoubtedly contributed to the high quality of records maintained in Prussian-controlled territories. This paper aims to characterize the sources relating to causes of death in Poznań, then the capital of the Poznań Province in the 19th century, and to examine the diversity and validity of these sources, the quality and reliability of medical statistics, the development of the Poznań Historical Population Database, and, finally, the research opportunities this database enables. The study highlights the importance of a critical methodological approach to historical cause-of-death data. It demonstrates that, although imperfect, such sources can provide valuable insights into past health patterns and administrative practices when interpreted with linguistic, medical, and contextual sensitivity. The resulting database offers a foundation for further interdisciplinary research on historical epidemiology and urban demography.
Copyright (c) 2026 Grażyna Liczbińska, Patryk Pankowski, Szymon Antosik, Karolina Kowalska https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Causes of Death in 19th-Century Ukraine. Parish Registers, Data Quality, and Source-Critical Analysis
This article examines parish registers as the primary source of mortality registration in 19th-century Ukraine and evaluates their potential and limitations for historical-demographic database construction. Drawing on Orthodox and Protestant parish registers from Left-bank and Southern Ukrainian territories of the Russian Empire, the study demonstrates that until the late 1830s these records rarely contained systematic information on causes of death and were characterized by substantial inconsistencies in age reporting, gender registration, and coverage of neonatal mortality. Based on an empirical analysis of more than 5,600 individual death records incorporated into the Ukrainian Mortality Database 19 (UMB19), the article identifies a clear institutional turning point around 1838, after which the recording of causes of death became more regular and increasingly standardized, though still dependent on the diligence and practices of individual clergy. Quantitative indicators such as age heaping and distorted sex ratios reveal persistent problems of underregistration, particularly of women and infants, while also allowing the identification of parish registers that meet minimum quality thresholds for inclusion in historical databases. The article further shows that 19th-century mortality statistics produced by ecclesiastical and civil authorities were entirely derivative of parish registers and therefore reproduced their structural biases. By outlining concrete criteria for source selection and data quality assessment, and by documenting the practical challenges of coding and standardizing historical causes of death, this study contributes to the methodological integration of Ukrainian materials into comparative European research on mortality and population history.
Copyright (c) 2026 Igor Serdiuk, Sviatoslav Chyruk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Individual-Level Causes of Death in Portugal, 1834–1910. Their Potential and Pitfalls for Studying Health Inequalities
This paper assesses the potential of Portugal's individual-level death certificates with stated causes of death by a physician (1834–1910), arguing that, despite assumptions of documentary scarcity, significant collections survive and can support the study of mortality and health inequalities. It outlines the historical trajectory of death registration with emphasis on liberal reforms initiated in 1837 which introduced physician-certified death certificates and burial tickets, intended to standardize cause-of-death reporting and generate data for public health administration. Implementation was uneven due to limited cemetery infrastructure, bureaucratic fragmentation, and popular resistance, but coverage expanded notably from the 1870s. Archival surveys reveal strong regional variation: some districts, including Porto, Lisbon, and Horta, achieved high coverage, while others show only partial or irregular adoption. Using Porto as a case study, the article presents the development of a new database (1869–1910) based on digitized certificates and burial tickets. Preliminary results demonstrate high representativeness, decreasing numbers of missing causes of death, and growing conformity with official nosologic classifications. Improvements are particularly visible in stillbirth reporting, child mortality diagnoses, and rural parishes. The database is being integrated with a historical GIS to support spatial analysis of mortality and living conditions. The article concludes that, despite gaps and losses, surviving certificates constitute a valuable and underused resource for investigating mortality patterns, public health policies, and socioeconomic inequalities in 19th-century Portugal.
Copyright (c) 2026 Paulo Teodoro de Matos, Diogo Paiva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From Macro-Statistics to Family Reconstitution Data. Causes of Death in Hungary (Sources and Databases — 19th and Early 20th Centuries)
This paper presents Hungarian sources that provide information on the causes of death at both individual and aggregate levels. It demonstrates how causes of death appeared in parish records from the early 19th century onwards, alongside denominational differences and legal prescriptions for recording them. The paper also outlines the process of increasing professionalism, from the mandatory recording of causes, and the involvement of coroners or physicians as death inspectors, to the introduction of civil registration, and the use of prescribed lists of illnesses and international classifications in the first half of the 20th century. The paper also discusses the completeness and reliability of parish records and civil registration, as well as the emergence of aggregate-level statistics, which influenced the content and accuracy of individual-level registration. It presents existing family reconstitution databases containing causes of death alongside digitised statistical publications, enabling a thorough analysis of the mortality transition.
Copyright (c) 2026 Péter Őri, Levente Pakot https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
A New Source for the Study of Unexplored Aspects of the Italian Health Transition: The Burial Permits
This paper introduces a new source for the study of mortality and the health transition in Italy: the Burial Permits. In the years leading up to the Italian Unification, local authorities began requiring official documentation, compiled by medical officers, for the burial of individuals in local cemeteries. These documents, preserved in the form of single sheets or registers, contain a wealth of individual-level data on deceased people, including the indication of the cause(s) of death. This feature, a novelty in the Italian historical demographic research, allows addressing a longstanding gap in the availability of individual-level information on causes of death, a factor that has limited and hampered the research on the evolution of the mortality patterns and the health transition in Italy. The paper provides a detailed description of this source and the type of information it contains, reviews what has been done so far, and investigates its possible applications to address new directions in the study of health and mortality in Italy.
Copyright (c) 2026 Matteo Manfredini, Lucia Pozzi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Individual-Level Data on Causes of Death in Madrid From 1905 to 1927
In this article, we present the Madrid database on causes of death, which currently covers the entire city for the period 1905–1927 and includes 366,542 individual notices. Such a resource is unique in the Mediterranean context. The genesis of our data lies in a political and intellectual context dominated by a complex mixture of fears, class contempt, and sincere concern for the most vulnerable, especially children, which explain the development of social and health data and the widespread use of quantitative methods in early 20th-century Spain, particularly in its capital. This resulted in the sources which, over the last 20 years, have been patiently compiled to construct the database of causes of death. The original data were enriched by linking individual data and coding operations, particularly for causes of death, for which two different grids were used. This article questions the quality and reliability of causes of death, that were extraordinarily diverse (n = 1,444). We also summarize the work already accomplished and outline some avenues for future research.
Copyright (c) 2026 Diego Ramiro Fariñas, Stanislao Mazzoni, Mélanie Bourguignon, Begoña Villuendas Hijosa, Michel Oris https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Norwegian Historical Population Register, 1801–present
The Norwegian Historical Population Register (NHPR) reconstructs the entire Norwegian population from 1801 to the present and links it with the modern National Population Register (NPR). It provides a multigenerational research infrastructure spanning seven generations and functions as an authoritative identifier system for documenting individuals and connecting diverse archival materials. This article presents the structure and development of the NHPR's two components: the open online register (NHPR-O), which documents deceased individuals using publicly accessible sources, and the closed register (NHPR-C), which integrates historical and modern microdata under privacy-preserving conditions. We describe the core sources and the hybrid linkage system combing large-scale algorithmic matching with extensive crowdsourcing. The paper reports current linkage rates across censuses, discusses the completeness and quality of historical sources, and examines challenges such as duplicate registrations, and the difficulty of identifying individuals with sparse information. We outline how continuous crowdsourcing and iterative quality control steadily improve linkage accuracy. Finally, the article discusses representativity, the constraints of privacy legislation, and the potential for international cooperation and distributed population registers. Together, these developments establish the NHPR as a scalable and evolving resource for research, genealogy, and public use.
Copyright (c) 2026 Lars Holden, Svetlana Boudko, Bjørn Fjellvoll https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Reproductive Timing and Family Structure as Determinants of Early-Life Mortality in Historical Poland
This study examines how parental age, birth spacing, sibling number and sex composition, and local socioeconomic and environmental conditions shaped early-life mortality in 19th-century urban Poland. Using reconstructed family histories from the Poznań Historical Population Database, we estimated the risk of infant mortality (before age 1) and child mortality (ages 1–5). Generalized additive models (GAMs) with a binomial logistic link were fitted separately for firstborn (n = 1,023) and laterborn children (n = 2,572). Among firstborns, a larger parental age difference was associated with lower child mortality, potentially reflecting selective mating or differences in parental resources and investment. Among laterborns, infant mortality declined with increasing paternal age, consistent with greater socioeconomic stability among older fathers. Infant mortality was higher following the death of a preceding brother, whereas child mortality was lower among children with a preceding brother. Although birth order and interbirth interval showed no significant direct associations, the protective effect of having a preceding brother weakened with increasing birth order. Mortality risks also varied across parishes, underscoring the importance of local socioeconomic and environmental conditions. Elevated parish-level infant mortality among male firstborns was consistent with established patterns of male vulnerability in early life. Overall, these findings provide new evidence on the determinants of early-life mortality in 19th-century Poznań and highlight the value of integrating biological, familial, and contextual factors when examining early-life survival in historical populations.
Copyright (c) 2026 Linda Koníková, Patryk Pankowski, Miroslav Králík, Grażyna Liczbińska https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
From Islands to Oceans. Gendered Strategies of Kinship and Patrimony Among Portuguese Women in Canary Islands (16th–17th Centuries)
This article reassesses the presence and agency of Portuguese women in Tenerife during the Iberian Union (1580–1640) through a prosopographic reading of notarial, inquisitorial and ecclesiastical documentation. Drawing on life‑course approaches, the study examines the legal and documentary moments through which Portuguese women became visible, situating their agency within the transitions that structured early modern family and mobility trajectories. Rather than attempting to reconstruct the Portuguese population as a whole, the study focuses on a small but analytically rich set of women whose actions — recorded in powers of attorney, wills, debt claims and trans‑archipelagic property transactions — make it possible to observe gendered strategies of mobility, representation and patrimonial management. By integrating a life‑course perspective with insights from Atlantic history and nesology, the analysis identifies three recurrent patterns: the central role of women in the transmission of property across islands; the heightened legal visibility associated with widowhood and the absence of male proxies; and the participation of certain households, particularly those linked to the Azores, in macro‑Atlantic circuits of craft, labour and migration. Comparisons by origin (Madeira, the Azores, continental Portugal) and civil status further clarify how women adapted a shared repertoire of strategies to different legal and familial contexts. The findings show that Portuguese women were not marginal actors but key architects of archipelagic continuity, transforming the constraints of insular life into forms of resilience that shaped kinship, identity and mobility across the early modern Atlantic.
Copyright (c) 2026 Javier Luis Álvarez Santos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
POPP. An OCR-Generated Database of the Population Censuses of Paris (1926–1936)
Empirical research in historical demography is usually time-consuming and labour-intensive. Recent developments in machine learning offer new possibilities for building very large databases with reduced time and costs, though these new methods raise new challenges as well. This article describes the process of constructing the POPP database, a data collection project based on the exploitation of the nominative lists of the Parisian population censuses of 1926, 1931, and 1936. This database provides a host of information for almost 9 million individuals: their name and surname, year and location of birth, nationality, relation to the household head, and occupation. The article discusses the digitisation of archival sources — several hundred thousand handwritten pages — their transformation into a database by computer scientists using machine learning techniques, and the work required on the part of social scientists to correct and adapt the resulting data for statistical purposes. Beyond its methodological contribution, this article also discusses the various ways in which the POPP database will improve our knowledge of the economic, social, and demographic evolution of an important European urban population.
Copyright (c) 2026 Sandra Brée, Victor Gay, Marion Leturcq, Yoann Doignon, Baptiste Coulmont https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This editorial reflects on recent developments at Historical Life Course Studies over the past two years. It highlights the successful completion of two special issues, including one on infant mortality and another on histories of health published in honour of Angélique Janssens. The editorial notes encouraging trends in submissions, citations, and online visibility, and announces an upcoming special issue on historical sources on causes of death. It also introduces changes to the editorial team, welcomes new associate editors, and acknowledges the vital contributions of sponsors, reviewers, authors, and readers who support the journal’s continued Diamond Open Access publication.
Copyright (c) 2026 Paul Puschmann, Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora, Gabriel Brea-Martinez , Wieke Elien Metzlar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Historical Development and Persistence of the Sex Gap in Life Expectancy in Estonia From the 19th to the 21st Century
The pronounced male disadvantage in life expectancy in Eastern Europe since the 1970s is a well-established finding in mortality research. However, a longer-term perspective has been largely absent, despite extensive documentation of changes in the sex gap in life expectancy across several Western European countries. The first objective of this paper is to examine the evolution of the sex gap in life expectancy in Estonia from the 19th century onward and compare it to other European nations. The second aim is to analyse the contributions of age- and cause-specific mortality and their interaction using Arriaga decomposition. The results show that since the 19th century, life expectancy at birth for Estonian men has consistently been at least 10% lower than that of women, albeit with some temporal variation. This means that the sex gap in Estonia has remained wider than in Western European countries throughout this time and not merely since the 1970s. The age and cause of death contributions have shifted in line with the health transition. Notable divergences from Western European patterns reflect Estonia’s distinct socio-political trajectory.
Copyright (c) 2026 Mark Gortfelder https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Overview and Comparison of 84 Databases with Historical Population Longitudinal Micro Data
In the last 65 years several major historical databases with reconstructed life courses of large populations have been launched. Around 1990, we could find two important types of databases with longitudinal micro-data. The first type were event databases aimed on family reconstructions and usually based on baptism, marriage and funeral registers or on civil certificates introduced after 1800. The second type were databases with life courses: persons are observed on a more permanent basis using church examination or population registers. After 1990 a third type, databases with census data, really took off. In first instance in the form of samples, in second instance by entering full count samples which makes it possible to link the several censuses into one system, creating semi-longitudinal databases. Another development was the growth of special purpose samples into semi-longitudinal ones by following sampled persons from one source during their life course through linking with all kind of other sources. The development of these databases is indicative of considerable investments that have greatly expanded the possibilities for new research within the fields of history, demography, sociology, as well as other disciplines. In this paper I will compare 84 of these databases on several key figures like included sources, year of foundation, period of observation, area of observation, sample fraction and number of included observations, families and unique persons. An overview of all databases with all key figures is presented in the Appendix.
Copyright (c) 2025 Kees Mandemakers https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Fertility in Rostock and Rural Mecklenburg-Schwerin in the 19th Century
In this paper we first set out to evaluate how much the fertility between Rostock as an urban settlement differed from the surrounding rural area of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, in the 19th century. The available microdata allows for a more in-depth analysis compared to previous research based on aggregate data. The censuses of 1819, 1867, and 1900 provide data for using the Own-Children-Method. We analyse the urban-rural difference, the influence of occupational groups in the city of Rostock and its rural surroundings, and finally the influence of migration on fertility in the city of Rostock. Immigration from rural areas and other cities was the main reason for the population increase of Rostock in the 19th century and this could have affected its fertility levels. Overall fertility was higher for rural areas than for urban ones, while marital fertility was more or less the same. Marital fertility was almost the same for all occupational groups, even for the agricultural sector. Migration had no visible effect on marital fertility, which is both interesting and unexpected. The most important factor for the level of overall fertility was the proportion of married people, which was an outcome of the possibilities offered by different economic sectors and environments.
Copyright (c) 2018 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Environmental Influences on Young Adult Male Height. A Comparison of Town and Countryside in the Netherlands, 1815-1900
The first phase of industrialization has often been associated with decreasing standards of living for workers, and early industrial towns and cities gained bad reputations. One of the best indicators for living conditions in early life is young adult height, and the literature has often pointed at urban-rural differences in heights to illustrate the initial decrease of living standards due to urbanization and industrialization. But how was urban residence connected to height? Causal mechanisms can include disease environment related to crowdedness, food availability or the nature of urban versus rural work. But perhaps urban-rural differences can simply be attributed to compositional effects, e.g. in cities relatively more poor, illiterate or incomplete families were to be found. Another question is whether urban-rural differences are limited to large cities compared to the rest, or whether we also find differences between towns and villages. In this brief, exploratory paper, we combine two detailed local datasets to provide answers to these questions. We contrast an early industrializing town, with a typical proletarian sub-culture of tile bakers and a significant middle class (Woerden in the province of South-Holland) to an agrarian community (the village of Akersloot and surrounding area in the province of North-Holland). Our dataset allows us to disentangle effects of the family composition, the family’s socio-economic status, food prices, and the environment on bodily growth of 1,738 young men. Our results suggest that the specific conditions of urban workers were more important for the physical development of their children than the urban or rural setting itself.
Copyright (c) 2017 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Mortality, Work and Migration. A Consideration of Age-specific Mortality from Tuberculosis in Scotland, 1861-1901
This paper provides an examination into some of the most enduring debates regarding tuberculosis mortality during the nineteenth century: those related to gender, geographic and temporal variations. We use populations reconstructed from individual census and civil register data for the period 1861 to 1901, comparing a growing urban area with a declining rural area, both with around 20,000 inhabitants in 1861. Our analysis shows that among young adults tuberculosis was linked to excess female mortality in the urban area and excess male mortality in the rural area. We demonstrate that in the town textile workers of both genders had particularly high mortality from tuberculosis, and that the only reason for higher overall female mortality was the predominance of young women in the textile labour force. We show that the age and gender-specific pattern of mortality in the rural area is consistent with higher male than female out-migration together with return migration of those who had contracted the disease elsewhere and needed care during their lengthy illness. We argue that the observed patterns are difficult to reconcile with the ‘bargaining-nutrition’ account of gendered patterns in tuberculosis mortality, and that they provide little support for nutrition as a key influence on the disease. However, our findings do reinforce Andrew Hinde’s recent argument that geographical patterns in sex-specific tuberculosis mortality rates were largely determined by migration patterns, and we discuss the implications of this for our understanding of the decline of the disease over the late nineteenth century.
Membership in and Presence of Voluntary Organisations during the Swedish Fertility Transition, 1880-1949
This article investigates the association between, participation in, and exposure to voluntary organisations and marital fertility during the European fertility transition from 1880 to 1949. This is achieved using individual-level longitudinal demographic data from northern Sweden linked with individual-level information on voluntary organisation membership and contextual level information on organisation activity. How living near an organisation influenced fertility is measured using mixed effect Cox regressions. The association to participation for both men and women is tested by matching members to a control group through propensity score matching before estimating differences in risks of another birth using Cox regressions. The results show that being exposed to an organisation was related to lower fertility. Joining a union or a temperance organisation showed even stronger negative associations, but only for male members, while female members showed no significant difference in fertility. The results suggest that reproductive decisions were not simple responses by the individual couple to structural changes but were also shaped within the social networks of which they were a part.
Later-Life Mortality and Longevity in Late-18th and 19th-Century Cohorts. Where Are We Now, and Where Are We Heading?
The limits to human lifespan are a widely discussed topic. Yet, later-life mortality and longevity are generally studied from a genetic perspective, while the social dimension has received less attention. This paper gives a systematic overview of trends in later-life mortality and longevity for cohorts that were born in the late 18th and 19th century, and shows that the average population and the top survivors from cohorts born between 1800 and 1850 were already growing older. These improvements in human survival were similar for both of the sexes among the top survivors, whereas gender equality in the life expectancy at age 50 grew rapidly in cohorts born after 1880. Differences between populations were determined by the disease environment, availability of food, and local diets, while lifestyles and social support from spouses and kin affected later-life expectancy and longevity within these populations. These findings have major implications on how we view the demographic and epidemiological transition, and forces us to reconsider existing explanations for improvements in survival during the 19th century. However, in order to find out the determinants of later-life mortality, external validity of results, blind spots due to missing data, and familial clustering need to be studied more thoroughly.