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Age Specific and Differential Fertility in Durham and Easington Registration Districts, England, 1851 and 1861*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
The current interest in fertility decline and the demographic transition has led to extensive study of the secular decline of fertility in countries and sub-regions of presently low fertility. Extensive work has been completed or is underway regarding Europe in connection with Ansley Coale’s European Fertility Project. In addition, considerable attention has been paid to fertility in the demographic experience of the United States, and to other areas which have experienced fertility decline. One problem with most historical fertility studies is that they lack data on age-specific fertility and also on fertility differentials. So, for example, the European Fertility Project has relied on a form of indirect standardization, the indices of overall fertility (If), marital fertility (Ig), illegitimate fertility (Ih), and proportions married (Im), to compensate for the lack of age-specific data. There are similar historical data constraints on some types of differential fertility categorizations (e.g., social class, literacy, occupation, nativity).
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Social Science History Association 1977
Footnotes
*
This research was supported in part by a grant from NICHHD (HD-07599). Many thanks go out to Roger Avery for helpful comments, to Ms. Eileen Driscoll for research assistance, to Cornell University for computer funds, and to the coders who have participated in this project.
References
Notes
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12 A further discussion of the manuscript census may be found in the section entitled “The Sample” below.
13 See Glass, D.V., “Changes in Fertility in England and Wales, 1851-1931,” 178-79Google Scholar.
14 Ig and Im were not calculated for 1850/52 and 1900/02 because census data on marital status by age and sex was not available for registration districts in the censuses of 1851 and 1901.
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16 There was very little change in illegitimate fertility during this period. The index of illegitimate fertility (Ih) remained unchanged at .007 for Durham and Easington between 1850/52 and 1860/62.
17 The films may be viewed there or they may be purchased. One unfortunate aspect of using them is that the films were made by “piece numbers,” which described the position of the original manuscripts in the P.R.O. archives. There is no catalogue by place as such. The user must look up the places of interest in several annotated census volumes kept at the P.R.O. and then find the corresponding piece numbers (which are also of varying length). The piece numbers are then used for ordering films. This means that the user (or a representative) must visit the P.R.O. in person.
18 For some of the problems in defining families and households for census purposes, see Tillott, P.M., “Sources of Inaccuracy in the 1851 and 1861 Censuses,” in Wrigley, E.A., ed., Nineteenth Century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data (Cambridge, England, 1972), 90-105.Google Scholar
19 Some examples are given in P.M. Tillott, “Sources of Inaccuracy in the 1851 and 1861 Censuses,” 90-116.
20 The number of children below age 5 present to women aged 50-54 was very small and could usefully be disregarded.
21 W.H. Grabill and Lee-Jay Cho, “Methodology for the Measurement of Current Fertility from Population Data on Young Children,” 50-73. Cho, Lee-Jay, Grabill, W.H., and Bogue, D., Differential Current Fertility in the United States, ch. 9Google Scholar.
22 The ratios were 1.0780 in 1851 and 1.0591 in 1861 for the total population. Separate corrections were not made for rural-urban populations because the ratios were so similar. Also separate corrections were not made for women of different ages because no estimation of this could be made. There is evidence that the incidence of children being absent from their mothers varies inversely with age, being highest for the youngest age groups of mothers. See Cho, Lee-Jay, Grabill, W.H., and Bogue, D., Differential Current Fertility in the United States, 320Google Scholar.
23 Taylor, A.J., “The Taking of the Census, 1801-1851,” British Medical Journal (1951)Google Scholar. Krause, John T., “Changes in English Fertility and Mortality, 1781-1850,” Economic History Review, 11 (1958).Google Scholar
24 Sargant, W.L., “Inconsistencies of the English Census of 1861,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 27 (1865), 73-124CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Farr, William, “On Infant Mortality, and on Alleged Inaccuracies of the Census,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 27 (1865), 125-49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
25 Coale, A.J. and Zelnik, M., New Estimates of Fertility and Population in the United States, 179-80Google Scholar.
26 For a definition of these measures, see, for example, Barclay, George W., Techniques of Population Analysis (New York, 1958), 51-55, 212-13.Google Scholar
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28 Glass, D.V., “Changes in Fertility in England and Wales, 1851-1931,” 162Google Scholar.
29 Keyfitz, Nathan and Flieger, Wilhelm, World Population: An Analysis of Vital Data (Chicago, 1968), 520-21.Google Scholar
30 Line 7 of Table 2 indicates a higher expectation of life at birth for females in Durham and Easington for 1851/60 than for England and Wales in 1861. On the other hand, the Durham and Easington life tables show higher female mortality for the childbearing ages 20-49 than for the 1861 English/Welsh table presented in Keyfitz and Flieger, World Population, 520.
31 Glass, D.V., “Changes in Fertility in England and Wales, 1851-1931,” 179, 182-83Google Scholar.
32 Keyfitz, N. and Flieger, W., World Population, 520Google Scholar.
33 These numbers are very large in relation to TFR’s because inflation factors must be introduced to adjust the rates for younger age groups. Since the notion of a fertility rate is to relate births to an approximation of person years at risk, it is quite apparent that the number of married females aged 15-19, for example, overstates the number of person years actually at risk because most were not married for the full five years. The same is true for married females age 20-24 and, to a much lesser extent, 25-29. Some correction must be applied to the age specific ratios of legitimate births to married women in order to deflate the denominator of the ratio (and hence inflate the ratio) to compensate for the fact that women averaged less than five person years at risk during that age interval. Procedures to do this are outlined in Cho, Grabill, and Bogue, Current Differential Fertility in the United States, 343-48.
34 It is not known who is going to marry, as opposed to who has married, a farmer, merchant, miner, etc.
35 Armstrong, W.A., “The Use of Information About Occupation,” in Wrigley, E.A., ed., Nineteenth Century Society, 203.Google Scholar
36 Armstrong, W.A., “The Use of Information About Occupation,” 209-11Google Scholar.
37 See, for example, Innes, J.W., Class Fertility Differentials in England and Wales, ch. 2Google Scholar.
38 Anderson, Michael, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (Cambridge, England, 1971), 25-29 and ch. 4, note 23.Google Scholar
39 Haines, M., “Fertility, Marriage, and Occupation in the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region, 1850-1880,” Table 4Google Scholar.
40 Haines, M., “Fertility and Occupation,” 18-21Google Scholar. Friedlander, D., “Demographic Patterns and Socioeconomic Characteristics,” 47-50Google Scholar.
41 See, for example, Notestein, Frank W., “Economic Problems of Population Change,” Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of Agricultural Economists (London, 1953).Google Scholar
42 For details see, for example, U.S. Bureau of the Census, The Methods and Materials of Demography by Shryock, Henry S., Siegal, Jacob S., and Associates (Washington, D.C., 1971), 433-46.Google Scholar
43 Keyfitz, N. and Flieger, W., World Population, 520Google Scholar.