History Of European Family Research Articles

Mosaic Database: Consolidation, Innovation, and Challenges in the Comparative Family Demography of Historical Europe

Abstract This paper looks at the progress that the Mosaic database has enabled in the study of family structures in continental Europe in the past. Our main argument is that the combination of comprehensive archival research, digitization and computation, data mining, and open-access dissemination that is at the core of the Mosaic project is bringing about an important shift in the fundamental principles that have driven European family history research to date. These transformative features of Mosaic go beyond mere data infrastructural developments, as scaling up to much larger datasets leads to qualitative differences in measurements, methods, and questions. Integrating these perspectives can lead to an important incremental shift in both the scale and the scope of knowledge about historical European family systems.

Temporalities and Transitions of Family History in Europe: Competing Accounts

Standard collective publications on European family history manifest large differences in their temporal structure. This article examines three examples from different countries and currents of research for the last five centuries. It discusses the question of whether, and to which degree, time theory can be applied to adjust and balance investigations of the domestic domain in the long run. For that purpose, this article uses the theoretical framework of US-American scholar Andrew Abbott. His work has provided important inputs for contemporary family research. Can we also use it for long-term investigations?

East European Resources for Genealogical Research

Meeting the information needs of patrons researching East European roots can be challenging for Slavic and genealogy subject specialists alike, neither of whom is normally trained to handle both the nuances of genealogical research and the challenges inherent in East European reference problems. An introduction to genealogical methods and a general awareness of available resources for East European family history can enable Slavic librarians to better facilitate genealogists. This article aims to provide this introduction and awareness, as well as to show how Slavic librarians can leverage their existing collections and expertise to help solve genealogy research problems.

European Family History

ABSTRACTHajnal's and Laslett's models of family and household have dominated research for over three decades. While a growing body of scholarship has questioned the operation of these models in detail, the view of the uniqueness of the West with its small families still has wide currency. The present work explores the ‘East–West’ paradigm as used by family historians, challenging both the evidence and its conceptual premise. It demonstrates the cultural roots of this thinking and argues that socio-economic factors are much more important determinants of household structure than geographical and cultural ones for an understanding of families in the past.

Irish Households in the Early Twentieth Century: Culture, Class, and Historical Contingency

This article explores the place of the Irish within European family history by comparing early twentieth century household patterns of four occupational groups (strong farmers, modest farmers, nonagricultural people, and laborers) within a small region of Country Kerry. While shared cultural values unify the Irish patterns in some respects, the different resource configurations of the four occupational groups generate clear differences. Some of the variability is strongly influenced by specific historical factors.

European family history and Roman law

Quelques récentes synthèses importantes concernant l'histoire de la vie familiale en Europe ont fait appel au droit romain pour expliquer des évolutions centrales, telles que l'exogamie, l'apparition de cellules famiales ‘commensurables’, et la naissance de l'autoritarisme paternel. De telles explications doivent présumer que les règles légales exercent une forte influence déterminante pour le comportment des membres de la famille. Cette hypothèse n'est pas justifiée quant au droit romain: la loi ne délimitait ni ne déterminait pas exhaustivement le comportement familial; au contraire, elle offrait un ensemble impresionnant d'instruments et d'institutions légaux, que l'on pouvait manipuler pour garanti une grande variété de relations et systèmes familiaux. Par conséquent, les modifications et la réintroduction du droit romain au bas Moyen-Age n'ont qu'un faible pouvoir explicatif pour la compréhension des différences entre la vie familiale dans le nord et dans le sud de l'Europe.

Myth-making in European Family History: the Zadruga Revisited

Myth-making in European Family History: the Zadruga Revisited

Iberian Family History

Throughout the 1970s there was a dearth of Iberian contributions to the expanding body of knowledge regarding European family history, but this is no longer the case. Studies carried out in the 1980s, as well as scholarship incorporated in the anthropological/ethnographic tradition and in the juristic tradition, provide contemporary as well as historical baselines against which the student of family history can compare and evaluate information gleaned from the analysis of population. The greater availability of primary sources in southern Europe portends the future proliferation of Iberian family history studies.

Advances in Italian and Iberian Family History

In the past decade a tremendous increase in family history research in Italy, Spain and Portugal provides new insight into family processes and has many implications for generalizations regarding the course of European family history. In this article many of these new findings are detailed and their historical and theoretical implications assessed. Previous generalizations regarding Mediterranean family history are examined in light of this new evidence. Among the topics discussed are the sources and methods employed in recent research, the household formation systems operating in Italy and Iberia, the role played by inheritance norms and by dowry, changing childrear ing practices—especially as regards child abandonment, marriage patterns, the family lives of the elderly, and the impact of migration on family life. The benefits of considering certain cultural topics in understanding the course of southern European family history are also considered