Life event recordsSocially important events during the life of a person are often recorded by secular and religious authorities. Three major events - birth, marriage and death - may be recorded well enough to be useful in a number of areas of research. Such documents usually record a limited set of information in a formularised manner. Some traditions (e.g. Italian church records, French civil records) are much better in terms of detail than others (e.g. English church records). Notable problems with continuity of recording are frequently seen around the time of major national upheavals (such as war or revolution) or local devastation (such as epidemics). Usually church records of baptism and burial can be used to approximate to the biological events of birth and death. Burial is more reliable than baptism in this context as it generally follows quickly on death whereas baptisms may occasionally take place some time after birth. Local or personal circumstances may delay baptism for anything from a few weeks to years. In a town like Ascoli, where record keeping is constantly monitored by ecclesiastical authorities, response was much more prompt than in rural areas where people may be living at some distance from the church. Records may also be well kept where secular authorities use church records for their own purposes. By the 19th century, state recording had generally replaced or supplemented church record keeping. Nevertheless, not all people chose to have their life events recorded by both civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Religious conviction aside, there are a wide range of benefits and disadvantages associated with both. For instance, in Britain today most people notify births to civil authorities because of the citizenship rights and resulting benefits this confers. Religious baptism is much less common. Marriages may be recorded in church or secular records, or both, but in some cases religious and secular ceremonies may not coincide in time. In 19th century Corsica, couples did not always go through the civil ceremony until later in life, many years after the church service. In post-war Italy widows sometimes remarried in church but did not go through a civil ceremony in order to maintain pension rights which would have been lost had their remarriages been officially notified to the state. Demographic studiesThe most frequent use is in demographic studies. Nowadays, states usually collect statistics, which may be more or less reliable, on such events, and use them, along with census figures, to understand population trends. Many states have such figures for most of the 19th and 20th centuries. These are usually published at a regional or national level.
In recent decades much work has been done in trying to use earlier life event records to understand demographic trends in the past. This follows pioneering work done by Louis Henry (1985) and others, with the method known as family reconstitution. Briefly, by linking baptisms to burial records, to the marriage of the parents and to any marriage(s) of the child in later life and then any spouse or parent with no recorded baptism to a burial, a skeleton population can be built up for a well recorded community. Only those links (baptism-marriage, etc) which are considered reasonably certain can be used for this purpose. The information can then be used to extract a number of demographic measures. There are many limitations with this method. Only those places with good, long runs of life event records can be used in such studies. A major drawback is that only the most completely recorded families can provide usable data. For example, it is not possible to calculate age at first marriage for a woman whose date of birth is not recorded. Therefore, only the stable population, in geographic terms, can be studied which introduces a degree of bias which may be greater or less depending on the migratory history of the location. Where movement is mainly local, this problem may be alleviated by studying a group of communities but the overheads in terms of data can be great. Community studiesSimilar methods may be used for other types of study, such as community reconstruction, which attempts to link records of all people recorded as having lived in a particular location over time. Because the aim is not to produce demographic statistics, partially recorded persons and families are also of interest. The data can be linked to other records - such as legal documents (sales, testaments, marriage contracts, leases) and population listings to help build up a detailed picture of a community or region. An excellent examples of this type of micro-history are the work of Giovanni Levi (1988) near Asti, northern Italy and French researchers such as the anthropologists Pierre Lamaison (1982) and Martine Segalen (1985). Where State of Souls listings exist these are of great benefit to reconstitution. Genealogy and kinshipAnother reason for making links between life event records is to build up genealogies. This is, in many ways, a multiple form of what people researching personal family histories do. But the interest here is in all lines of ascent, descent and affinity. What the researcher builds are not networks of kinship but of social expressions of biology and of affinity. The main purposes have been to examine marriage practices, family strategies and kinship forms. Segalen, Lamaison (ops cit) and Delille (1985) have reconstructed the genealogies of people in communities and regions and examined the types and incidence of different marriage forms within them. Reconstructed genealogies supplemented by information on such matters as will bequests, family courts, neighbourhood disputes or family crises provide invaluable insights into the range and extent of kinship recognition and obligation as well as the potential availability of kin in the local area. They can also be linked to information on property transmission (from legal documents or cadasters) or residential choices (from population listings) to give a long term view of heirship strategies and patrimonial dynamics. BibliographyDellile, G. 1985 Famille et propriété dans le Royaume de Naples (XVe-XIXe siècle) École Française de Rome Fleury, M. and Henry, L. 1985 Nouveau manuel de dépouillement et d'exploitation de l'état civil ancien Institut National d'Études Démographiques Lamaison, P. 1982 L'impossible marriage: Violence et parenté en Gevaudan 17e, 18e and 19e siècles Hachette Levi, G. 1988 Inheriting power: The story of an exorcist University of Chicago Press Segalen, M. 1985 Quinze générations de Bas-Bretons Presses Universitaires de France |
