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Over the last few decades, researchers in fields such as history, the social sciences and medicine have had improved access to census materials in northern Europe, making an update on these infrastructures both possible and topical. This book's presentation of European census history and infrastructure is not strictly limited to northern Europe, although most of the Mosaic materials originated north of the forty-fifth parallel.
The template for modern census-taking was created by Adolphe Quetelet in Belgium in the 1830s, and his census standards were spread almost globally by the international statistical conferences. This book explores Icelandic residence patterns amongst the elderly; Siberian polygamy as indicated in the Polar Census; men's living arrangements in Northern Norway; Sweden's pioneering register-based census in 1930; unique source materials on the Soviet family; and data on Ukrainian and Russian population groups in the most recent Ukrainian censuses. All of these contributions stress the book's focus on Northern European census data. This book was originally published as a special issue of The History of the Family.
List of contents
Introduction:
Three centuries of northern population censuses
1.
Residence patterns of the elderly in early eighteenth-century Iceland
2. Masculine responsibility across generations: living arrangements in a Norwegian parish around 1900
3. Mosaic: recovering surviving census records and reconstructing the familial history of Europe
4. Sweden in 1930 and the 1930 census
5. Polygamy among indigenous people of northern West Siberia in ethnographic and early census materials
6. Primary sources on the history of the Soviet family in the twentieth century: an analytical review
7. Birthplaces, migration and identity in the 2001 census for Ukraine
About the author
Gunnar Thorvaldsen is Professor of History and Director of The Norwegian Historical Data Centre, at the University of Tromsø, Norway. His main research interests are historical demography, the history of the census, and longitudinal population register methodology. He currently heads the effort to build a historical population register for Norway.
Summary
Over the last few decades, researchers in fields such as history, the social sciences and medicine have had improved access to census materials in northern Europe, making information about these infrastructures topical. This book was originally published as a special issue of The History of the Family.
