Demographic behavior in the long run: Württemberg, 1650-1914

This paper presents first results from a long project that has reconstituted the populations of three villages in Württemberg (south Germany) from the mid-seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries. With access to high-quality registers of births, deaths, and marriages, and unusual ancillary sources, we are able to improve on the techniques of family reconstitution pioneered by Louis Henry and applied to good effect by the Cambridge Group and other scholars. Later steps in the project will combine the family-reconstitution results with information on taxes, political office-holding, and occupation; and with data on the nature and extent of wealth taken from an unusually comprehensive system of inventories. In subsequent publications we will employ all this information with detailed econometric techniques to study the determinants of demographic and related behavior in these three communities. Here we focus on simple, standard demographic measures. This approach permits a broad overview and supports comparison to family-reconstitution studies undertaken elsewhere. The methods we employ here suffice to demonstrate the importance of an unusual system of demographic regulation that operated in these Württemberg communities until the 1860s. This regulation created in effect a two-tiered demographic system: a group of "insiders" were able to marry, and experienced both high marital fertility and high infant and child mortality. A second group of "outsiders" were not allowed to marry. Many outsiders left the community; those who stayed had children only by contributing to the growing rates of illegitimacy seen in these communities.