Family Reconstitution
Untainted by Nazi associations, a French demographer, Louis Henry (1911–1991), was developing methods in France to survey historic populations. His 1956 book co-written with Michel Fleury, Des registres paroissiaux à l'histoire de la population. Manuel de dépouillement et d'exploitation de l'état civil ancien, explained how to start a one-place study.
By 1959 he was proposing to reconstitute the population of France from 1670 to 1829. As a founder of Historical demography, Henry devised methods that went well beyond mere extraction, and he developed elaborate rules to correct bias and indicate which family histories could be used for different kinds of statistical analysis.
In England, family reconstitution methods were adopted and developed by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure established in 1964. Amateur one-place studies followed in the 1980s as an outgrowth of indexing projects under the leadership of John Dowding and Colin Mills and achieved regional scale with the Devon Online Parish Clerks and One-Place Studies project.
The fact that seven censuses from 1841 to 1901 provide a household-by-household record of the entire population may have reduced the perceived need in Britain for one-place studies compared to the interest they have generated in Germany and France. Many English studies therefore concentrate on the period before 1837, the year when open-access, national indexes of births, marriages and deaths in England and Wales began.
Read more about this topic: One-place Study
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