Erik Beekink

This paper shows that the dynamics of late 19th-century cholera in a relatively small town differed from the alarming dynamics of this contagious disease in large towns and metropoles. With 1866 Woerden as case study, a town located in the heart of the Netherlands, we show that the fourth and final major cholera outbreak was framed as just another crisis, on top of other crises and soon to be replaced by other crises. The outbreak not only hit the poor but also the elites and middleclass families, most probably because most of the households relied on water supply from the same river. The needy citizens could, in times of cholera, rely on additional support, but evidence also shows that local institutions already offered a wide range of support, even to migrants.

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 co...

This paper presents the longitudinal database POPLINK, which has been developed at the Demographic Data Base at Umeå University, Sweden. Based on digitized Swedish population registers between c. 1700-1950, the database contains micro-data that covers the agrarian society through industrialization and further on to the Swedish welfare state and contemporary society. It is now possible to study the profound processes of the second demographic transition using individual level data with a proper size population. POPLINK allows for a large array of longitudinal studies, such as social mobility, migration, fertility, mortality, civil status, kinship relations, diseases, disability and causes of death. International standards of occupations (HISCO) and diseases (ICD-10) have been applied, facilitating comparability. POPLINK covers two large regions in Northern Sweden and is built on complete registrations. It is one of the world’s most information-dense historical population databases, c...

The 19th and 20th centuries have been an era characterised by social modernisation spurred on primarily by economic developments. This process of modernisation also had an impact on interpersonal relationships and resulted in a more open society. The degree of homogamy between husbands and wives is an important indicator for societal openness, the theory being that the changes which occurred during this period enabled people to be freer and less pragmatic when choosing a spouse. This paper examines this thesis by studying changes in social class, age- and religious homogamy based on marriage data for the town of Woerden during the period 1830-1930. In contrast to other studies which examined the degree of homogamy of each of these variables in isolation, our aim was to reveal the interrelationship between the factors which influenced a person's choice of spouse, using log-linear analyses. The results show that a unidimensional model positing a trend towards increasing openness c...

This paper is one of a series of five studying the intergenerational transfer of infant mortality down the maternal line. All five studies share the same theoretical and methodological design, and use data derived from a standard database format: the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS). The data for the research reported in this paper were derived from a longitudinal dataset covering the 19th and 20th century population of the province of Troms in Northern Norway. Our results suggest that there was an element of intergenerational transmission in women’s risk of experiencing an infant death; the children of a woman whose mother had had a high number of infant deaths also had a greater risk of dying before their first birthday. The risk of an infant death occurring among the children of daughters from such ‘high risk’ families was at least 30 per cent higher than that amongst infants born to the daughters of mothers who had experienced zero infant deaths.

In this paper the process of leaving the parental home among young adults is studied. After a brief historical overview, three main reasons for leaving home are distinguished, viz. leaving home to complete an education, leaving home to start living with a partner, and leaving home to gain more autonomy and independence. Both the timing and the main reason for leaving the parental home is expected to depend on the resources of the young adults' parents. Four classes of parental resources are distinguished, viz. material and non-material resources that can be transferred to young adults, and material and non-material resources that cannot be transferred to young adults. It is hypothesized that high levels of transferable parental resources facilitate the process of leaving home, whereas high levels of non-transferable resources slow down this process. The hypotheses are tested using data from a survey among 583 young adults born in 1961 in the Netherlands. Discrete-time hazard models are used to test the effect of parental resources on the process of leaving home. Most hypotheses, though not all, are supported by the data. High levels of transferable parental resources speed up the process of leaving home for educational and independence reasons, though not for reasons of starting a partner relationship. High levels of non-transferable parental resources slow down the process of leaving home, though only with regard to leaving home in order to gain autonomy and independence.

ABSTRACT De afgelopen jaren kwamen enkele grote gemeentelijke herindelingsplannen in het nieuws, zoals de samenvoeginge van Enschede, Hengelo en Borne tot Twentestad. Herindeling is echter niet iets van de laatste jaren. Het aantal gemeenten is de afgelopen twee eeuwen door diverse herindelingen en gemeentegrenswijzigingen fors gedaald. In 1817 waren er 1236 gemeenten, in 1999 nog maar 538. Cijfers bestrijken de periode 1820-2000.

This article describes the first results of a project which has as its central aim the construction of a database and accompanying maps with historical data on infant and total mortality for all municipalities in the Netherlands during the period 1812-1939. After a short overview of earlier attempts made by nineteenth-century doctors and statisticians to construct maps of mortality, we describe the data included in the database. The possible use of the mortality atlas is illustrated by means of four maps, dealing, respectively, with the changing geography of infant mortality between 1840 and 1939, the regional differences in the mortality effect of the potato-blight, and regional differences in the health consequences of the Spanish flue.

... Page 2. Page 3. NEDERLAND IN VERANDERING Page 4. Page 5. Nederland in verandering Maatschappelijke ontwikkelingen in kaart gebracht, 1800-2000 Er1k Beek1nk, Onno Boonstra, Theo Engelen & Hans Knippenberg (redact1e) Thls O no Page 6. ...