This article uses the evidence of midwifery deliveries to investigate the strengths and shortcomings of parish registers, and to pose questions about infant and maternal mortality. It focuses on the delivery notebooks of Thomas Higgins, a man-midwife of north Shropshire, but also employs comparators from Staffordshire and Yorkshire. The research incorporates a technique for dealing with infants where neither a baptism nor a burial can be found. The findings include rare evidence about rates of stillbirth and maternal mortality, and suggest some adjustments to the assumptions made for conducting parish reconstitutions.

A serial study of court records from two different jurisdictions in early modern Valencia shows that during the years 1566–1686 there was one single period with significantly higher numbers of trials against French defendants. This coincided with the period of the Spanish monarchy's greatest worries about outside influence in Spain. However, the increased number of trials is only traceable in one of the two courts under study, that of the Inquisition, which was under the control of the central government. The locally controlled court of criminal justice (Justicia) did not show any such increased activity against Frenchmen.

The consideration of the removals aspect of settlement law – that is, the moving on of paupers or potential paupers to the parish where they ‘belonged’ – has focused almost exclusively on working-age adults and labour migration. This article focuses on how removal law affected families with children in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in two large London parishes. It finds that children were a sizeable presence among the removed population but that there were notable differences in family type between the two parishes. Furthermore, while most young children were kept with their mothers even if they did not share a settlement, others were removed alone, even after a change in settlement law in 1795 that should have assured their common claim in certain cases. The study sheds light on attitudes to poor children and their families, as well as on the exigencies brought about by economic circumstances and employment opportunities in the parish.

Leaving home and entering service was a key transition in early modern England. This article presents evidence on the age of apprenticeship in London. Using a new sample of 22,156 apprentices bound between 1575 and 1810, we find that apprentices became younger (from 17.4 to 14.7 years) and more homogeneous in age, irrespective of background. We examine the effect of region of origin, parental occupation, Company entered and paternal mortality on age of entry. The fall in apprentices' ages has significant implications for our understanding of the labour supply, training structures, experiences of apprenticeship and family economy in this period.

In this article the participation profile of commoners of a Flemish case-study is reconstructed in order to identify their individual motivations for using the common, in some cases even becoming a manager of that common, in some cases only just claiming membership. Nominative linkages between membership lists, book-keeping accounts and regulatory documents of the common on the one hand and censuses and marriage acts on the other allow us to explain the behaviour of the commoners. It becomes clear why some decisions were taken – for example, to dissolve a well-functioning cattle-registration system – and how these affected the resource use of the common during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The analysis explains how internal shifts in power balances amongst groups of active users and those who did not have the means or willingness to participate could jeopardize the internal cohesion of the commoners as a group.

The article highlights the significance of alliances of blood and marriage in early modern England and beyond, including both positive and negative relations among kin. Examining different historiographical approaches, it emphasizes the role of kinship in explanations of historical change and continuity. Rather than focusing on the isolated nuclear family or, conversely, on an alleged decline of kinship, it highlights the importance of enmeshed patterns of kinship and connectedness. Such patterns were not only important in themselves (whether culturally, socially, economically, or politically), it is suggested, but they also invite new comparisons with other early modern societies, and in the long run. Even patterns typical of present-day ‘new families’ and ‘families of choice’, or aspects of the present-day language of kinship may bring to mind some similarities with notions of kinship and related ‘household-family’ ties characteristic of the early modern period, the article proposes.

This article is a study of single mothers in Lyon in the nineteenth century, including what happened to them after they gave birth to an illegitimate child. Unmarried mothers have been the subject of much previous research on different countries but such studies often begin with the last days of the pregnancy and stop a few days after the delivery. Our aim is to look at the life course of single mothers before pregnancy and after delivery. In Lyon, at the time the second French city in terms of population, we studied 2,000 unwed mothers, some of them multiparous, noting their extensive geographical mobility and the frequency of their moves within the city.

Around 1900 infant mortality rates (IMR) in Uruguay were among the world's lowest. By 1910, however, the IMR began a decades-long stagnation, while other countries experienced ongoing improvements. This article examines the conundrum of Uruguay's infant mortality stagnation, highlighting the leading causes of death – diarrhoeal and respiratory diseases – and their relation to social, economic and political conditions.

Drawing on an array of demographic, medical eyewitness and social sources, we explore why, despite Uruguay's precocious social welfare investments, its IMR stagnated and what enabled its eventual decline circa 1940. We conclude that a confluence of public health, medical and social factors enabled disease-specific improvements, but only after political pressure for large-scale redistribution of wealth was translated into extensive welfare state measures.

This article observes the ways in which the law mediated kinship relations in early modern England in three contexts: inheritance, marital property law, and provisions for the financially distressed. An enquiry into statutory law adopted during the period indicates that Parliament was not active in legislating in the area of family law. The courts, however, were actively involved in determining the validity of property settlements, thereby setting their temporal bounds. Both the jurisprudence and the settlements themselves illustrate that families became more interested in providing maintenance within the nuclear family (for children and widows) than they were in fostering patrilineal continuity. Likewise, an obligation to support financially needy kin was required from only a relatively small universe of family members.

In this article, we study variations in co-residence with kin in the Netherlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We use the reconstructed life courses of 17,527 individuals derived from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) database. The life-course approach allows us to look at co-residence from the perspectives of both the receiving households and the co-resident kin. What made households take in relatives and do we find a preference for one type of relative over another? What was the background of people who decided to co-reside in another household? How important were family-related ‘altruistic’ motives compared with economic ones? The outcomes suggest the predominance of altruistic motives for co-residence, apart from persistent inheritance customs in the eastern part of the country.

This article examines the interplay of the Secularization of 1803, the ‘professionalisation’ of pharmacy, and increasing state control in Württemberg after 1806 by looking at convent pharmacies and their destiny after the secularization of the convents in 1803. This interplay consequently led to the temporary abolition of convent pharmacies and with them an important occupational niche for female apothecaries was thus lost. The research is based on a detailed case study of the convent pharmacy in Gutenzell in Upper Swabia, 50 kilometres south of Ulm.

This article evaluates the extent of economic support provided by the family in English society. The first issue addressed is the importance given to relationships between family members both by contemporaries and by historians when attempting to distinguish different types of household. Following sections of the article discuss the role of households in redistributing income from the better-paid to the less well-paid or non-earners and the significance of economic support received from members of the family living elsewhere relative to that provided from within the household and from other outside sources, such as the community, employers and neighbours. A further section then assesses the impact of demographic change on the size and composition of the kin group and the extent to which population mobility made regular contact with close kin more difficult.

The SOCSIM micro-simulation model is used to investigate how kinship and family patterns in Britain changed as people passed through the ‘First Demographic Transition’, starting in the late nineteenth century, and the ‘Second Demographic Transition’, from the 1960s. Certain types of kin, such as former partners, became more common, and others, such as ever-born siblings, less so. An ageing of generational relationships is observed: events that formerly occurred early in life, such as the experience of one's parents' deaths, are being postponed. Patterns of re-partnering are leading to more partial relationships involving step- and supplanted parents, half-siblings, former partners and stepchildren.