Using Census Returns and the Own-Children Method to Measure Marital Fertility in Rawtenstall, 1851-1901

Abstract

The incompleteness of Victorian census returns of marriage and birth records for England and Wales, and the high costs of using civil and church records, have greatly restricted research into the timing and character of the decline in marital fertility in the second half of the 19th century. This article argues that, in spite of these limitations, the census returns provide enough data to allow the well-known the 'Own-children method of fertility estimation', when used within Bongaarts' framework for analysing the proximate determinants of fertility, to derive estimates of total and age-specific marital fertility for women 15 to 49 years of age. It uses data from the census returns for the town of Rawtenstall, a small cotton textile manufacturing town in north-east Lancashire, to generate these estimates and to test their credibility against other well respected measures of marital fertility for England and Wales.