Thank You, Akira Hayami! The Xavier Database of Historical Japan

This article introduces the Xavier database, one of the major sources for studying historical populations in Japan. The database consists of 162 years of annual observations for 28,105 individuals living in three villages and one town of the current Fukushima prefecture between 1708 and 1870. We review the extensive efforts of the founder of Japanese historical demography, Akira Hayami, and his group in collecting, transcribing, coding, and finally making local population registers into this database for demographic analysis. We discuss the studies that flourished domestically and internationally using the data in the last two decades, followed by the discussion of current and promising development.

The South African Families Database

Very little is known about what family life looked like for settlers in colonial South Africa during the 18th or 19th century, nor how events over these centuries might have affected demographic change. The primary reason for this lacuna is a shortage of adequate data. Historians and genealogists have, over the last century, worked to combine the rich administrative records that are available in the Cape Archives in Cape Town and beyond, into a single genealogical volume of all settlers living in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century. Until recently, this valuable resource was not in a format that would enable its use for the type of event-history analyses that have come to dominate the field of contemporary historical demography. This is now changing with the introduction of the South African Families database (SAF). SAF is one of very few databases known to document a full population of immigrants and their families over several generations. This article introduces provides a brief background to, and technical overview of, the construction of the SAF. It discusses both the merits and limitations of its use in longitudinal demographic studies and offers a look into the types of studies it can enable.

The Long Road to Health and Prosperity, Southern Sweden, 1765-2015. Research Contributions From the Scanian Economic-Demographic Database (SEDD)

The Scanian Economic-Demographic Database (SEDD) at the Centre for Economic Demography (CED), Lund University was built to answer questions derived from previous research using macro data from 1749 onwards. It includes longitudinal micro data for a regional sample of rural, semi-urban, and urban parishes in southern Sweden from 1646 to 1968 for approximately 175,000 individuals. In addition to the data on births, deaths, marriages, and occupations, it includes data on migration, household size, landholdings, taxation, and heights from the 1800s onwards and on income from 1865 onwards. After being linked from 1968 to 2015 to a range of national registers with detailed demographic and socioeconomic information, it includes 825,000 individuals. The richness and wide range of micro data have allowed researchers to follow individuals throughout their lives and across generations, covering extensive periods, and to make comparisons with results from macro data. This research has partly confirmed the established view on long-term changes in living standards and demographics in Sweden but has also brought into question some previously held truths.

The Utah Population Database. The Legacy of Four Decades of Demographic Research

This paper summarizes the unique characteristics of the Utah Population Database (UPDB) and how it has catalyzed demographic, social and medical research since the mid-1970s. The UPDB is one of the world’s richest sources of linked population-based information for demographic, genetic, and epidemiological studies at the Individual-level. UPDB has supported hundreds of demographic and biomedical investigations, with heavy emphasis on families, in large part because of its size, representativeness, inclusion of multi-generational pedigrees, and linkages to numerous data sources. The UPDB contains data on over 11 million individuals from the late 18th century to the present. UPDB data represent Utah’s population that appear in administrative records and many of these data are updated due to longstanding efforts to add records as they become available including statewide birth and death certificates, hospitalizations, ambulatory surgeries, and driver licenses. The depth of information within UPDB has been used to support a wide range of family, medical and historical demographic studies which are described here arranged into four broad categories: fertility, mortality, life course analyses and some selected special topics. The paper concludes with a discussion of the future areas of innovation within the UPDB and the types of novel studies that they are likely to facilitate.

Reconstructing a Longitudinal Dataset for Tasmania

This article describes the formation of The Tasmanian Historical Dataset a longitudinal data resource spanning the 19th and early 20th century. This resource contains over 1.6 million records drawn from digitised prison and hospital admission registers, military enlistment papers, births, deaths and marriages, census and muster records, arrival and departure lists, bank accounts and property valuations, maps and plans and meteorological observations. As well as providing an account of the many different sources that have been digitised coded and linked as part of this initiative, the article outlines current and past research uses to which this data has been put. Further information on tables and key variables is provided in an appendix.

Building Longitudinal Datasets From Diverse Historical Data in Australia

Australia is rich in population datasets generated to manage convicts, civilians, stock, land and the colonised and displaced First Nations people. It has also preserved all service and pension data from both world wars. Through nominal linkage using volunteers and paid research staff, it has been possible over the past twenty years to build four cradle-to-grave datasets derived from administrative cohorts: poor white babies born in a charity hospital 1858–1900; Aboriginal Victorians from 1855 to 1988; convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land 1818-1853 and servicemen who embarked for World War I from the State of Victoria. The abundance of digitised historical sources from government archives to historical newspapers enables the practice of demographic prosopography, with a wide range of variables that have yielded new insights into Australia’s population and social history.

The Roots of the Obesity Boom. The Relationship Between Overweight and Educational Level Among Dutch Men, 1950–1979

While in modern, high-income populations, obesity is associated with being from a low socio-economic background, this may not have always been the case. We test the relationship between obesity and educational level (as a proxy for socio-economic status) in a historical cohort of Dutch military conscripts, from the conscription years 1950–1979. We find that in the 1950s cohort, being in tertiary education was significantly associated with an increased likelihood of being overweight. In contrast, in the 1970s cohort, being in tertiary education was significantly associated with a decreased likelihood of being overweight. We find evidence that the prevalence of obesity remained broadly similar among more highly educated men, while it increased among men of a lower educational level. This likely contributed to the overall rise in the obesity rate. Our findings echo other studies that find a crossover in education’s relationship to BMI as populations become wealthier and obesity rates rise.

Historical Databases Now and in the Future

Kees Mandemakers has enriched historical databases in the Netherlands and internationally through the development of the Historical Sample of the Netherlands, the Intermediate Data Structure, a practical implementation of rule-based record linking (LINKS) and personal encouragement of high quality longitudinal data in a number of countries.

Intergenerational and Marriage Mobility of University Professors in the Netherlands During the 19th Century

In this study we ask the question to what extent 19th-century university professors were a closed occupational group in the sense that they had little intergenerational and marriage mobility. We do so in honor of Kees Mandemakers, who is about to retire as a professor, but whose younger family members may follow in his footsteps. We derive competing hypotheses from cultural capital theory and the meritocracy thesis and test them using civil marriage records for the period 1813–1922 in six Dutch provinces (N = 1,180,976 marriages). Although only 4.4% of all university professors had a father in the same occupation, the odds ratio of 331 shows that this is much more likely than to be expected under independence. Similarly, professors were much more likely to marry the daughter of a professor. Compared to other elite occupations the intergenerational immobility of professors was not especially high, but their marriage immobility was exceptional. Cultural capital theory receives more support than the meritocracy thesis. We hope that Mandemakers, Mandemakers and Mandemakers will accept the challenge and investigate whether these findings can be generalized to contemporary society.

Grammar of Difference. General Education in the Netherlands and Java, 1800-1940

This contribution compares developments in school enrolment and public investments in primary education in the Netherlands and its most important colony in the 19th century: the Netherlands East Indies, more specifically the island of Java. Despite being part of the same Empire, conditions in both regions were very different, with the metropole having already quite high enrolment rates from the beginning of the period studied (the early 19th century) compared to very low school attendance in the colony. For long, the colonial government left indigenous education in Java to religious and private initiatives, whereas primary schooling in the Netherlands was increasingly financed and regulated. Rising interest for public schooling in the colony, including some government investment in the first decades of the 20th century did lead to some changes, but these were insufficient to prevent Dutch and Javanese children from experiencing a fundamentally different educational upbringing.