Siegfried Gruber

Stem Families, Joint Families, and the European Pattern: What Kind of a Reconsideration Do We Need?

This article makes a new contribution to the discussion of historical European family forms. Its starting points are two recent contributions by Steven Ruggles in which the author discussed the historical appearances of stem and joint families across the globe. Drawing on most recent developments in census microdata infrastructure from historical Eastern, Central, and Southeastern Europe, the authors pinpoint limitations pertaining to the usage of IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Series) and NAPP (North Atlantic Population Project) collections for the investigation of European family systems. Using newly acquired materials and refined conceptual tools, they enhance the knowledge about the spatiotemporal distribution of stem- and joint-family arrangements in a broader European context. As the frequency of joint families in the regions under study cannot be fully accounted for by referring to measures of economic conditions and demographic structures alone, the authors speculate about some additional factors which may explain the observed differences in joint-family coresidence across historic Eastern Europe.

Household structures in Albania in the early 20th century

This article attempts to shed light on household structures in Albania based on the census of 1918. Quantitative data enable the investigation of patterns of household formation and marriage in a region where such research previously has been missing. The results confirm eastern European marriage patterns for women but not for men in Albania. Northern Albania lies in the core zone of the Balkan patriarchy and joint family households have prevailed in rural Albania, despite a tendency toward frequent divisions of households among brothers. Most important, there existed a great variety of types of households in different villages in Albania in 1918.

Mosaic: recovering surviving census records and reconstructing the familial history of Europe

In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the demand for global data on historical family systems, both in the social sciences and in the humanities. Until lately, however, scholars interested in historical global family variation had to rely on simplified and often ahistorical world-scale classifications of family systems by world geographic regions. This article communicates Mosaic to the scholarly community – one of the largest infrastructural projects in the history of historical demography and family sociology. The article provides a brief history of the project, a discussion of the main issues involved in creating the database (including sampling and representativeness), and Mosaics data structure and coverage. In the remainder of the article, the authors provide an overview of methodological and research opportunities that the project can offer to scholars, showing how the most pertinent problems of historical family demography can be tackled in more systematic ways than previously.

The patriarchy index: a comparative study of power relations across historical Europe

This article stands at the confluence of three streams of historical social science analysis: the sociological study of power relations within the family, the regional demography of historical Europe, and the study of spatial patterning of historical family forms in Europe. It is a first exercise in the design and application of a new ‘master variable’ for cross-cultural studies of family organization and relations. This indexed composite measure, which the authors call the Index of Patriarchy, incorporates a range of variables related to familial behaviour, including nuptiality and age at marriage, living arrangements, post-marital residence, power relations within domestic groups, the position of the aged, and the sex of the offspring. The index combines all these items, with each being given equal weight in the calculation of the final score, which represents the varying degrees of sex- and age-related social inequality (‘patriarchal bias’) in different societal and familial settings. In order to explore the comparative advantages of the index, the authors use information from census and census-like microdata for 91 regions of historical Europe covering more than 700,000 individuals living in 143,000 domestic groups, from the Atlantic to the Urals. The index allows the authors to identify regions with different degrees of patriarchy within a single country, across the regions of a single country, or across and within many broader zones of historical Europe. The unprecedented patterning of the many elements of power relations and agency contained in the index generates new ways of accounting for both the geographies and the histories of family organization across the European landmass.

Household structures in urban Albania in 1918

This article intends to shed further light on urban household structures in Albania as far less is known about them compared with rural households. The population census of 1918, which was forgotten for decades, is used for this purpose and proves to be a very valuable source. After a look at the theoretical framework of household formation patterns in this region and at comparative studies in other countries of the region, the size and composition of households in Albania are analysed and differences within the urban population recognised. These urban households were smaller and less complex than rural households in Albania. This investigation into the lives of urban dwellers regarding their living jointly with other members of the household adds to the picture of households frequently being divided between brothers. Nevertheless, multiple-family households also existed in an urban environment and more so in Albania than in neighbouring countries. One can find many differences within the urban population concerning the size and complexity of their households, but a higher status tended to be necessary to increase the complexity of the household. The different economic and spatial environment in cities made living in a multiple-family household more difficult to achieve and therefore richer rather than poorer people more usually lived in such constellations.

The Patriarchy Index: A New Measure of Gender and Generational Inequalities in the Past

This article presents a new measure of family-driven age- and gender-related inequalities. This composite measure, which we call the Patriarchy Index, combines a range of variables related to familial behavior that reflect varying degrees of sex- and age-related social inequality across different family settings. We demonstrate the comparative advantages of the index by showing how 266 historical populations from the Atlantic coast of Europe to Moscow scored on the patriarchy scale. We then compare the index with contemporary measures of gender discrimination, and find a strong correlation between historical and current inequality patterns. Finally, we explore how variation in patriarchy levels across Europe is related to the socioeconomic and institutional characteristics of the regional populations, and to variation across these regions in their degree of demographic centrality and environmental conditions. The results confirm previous findings that family organization is a crucial generator of social inequality, and point to the importance of considering the historical context when analyzing the current global contours of inequality.

Spatial Distribution of Rural Social Strata: UsingDigitised Maps in Historical Research

This article deals with using digitised maps inhistorical research and their possible contributionsto it. The use of cartographic data is especiallyuseful in research dealing with the spatialdistribution of various phenomena. The spatialdistribution of rural social strata is one suchphenomenon that has not yet received much attention.The case study of Pischelsdorf, an Austriansettlement, in the beginning of the nineteenth centuryshall serve as an example for such research.Pischelsdorf is situated in the Austrian province ofStyria, about 150 km from Vienna, and served as asmall centre for trade and handicraft for thesurrounding villages. This study is based on the landregister of 1822 which has been digitised.

The dissolution of the large complex households in the Balkans: Was the ultimate reason structural or cultural?

The article examines three village communities—Lekenik in Civil Croatia, Bobovac in the Croatian Military Border, and Orasac in Serbia—to answer the question of why the inhabitants of these villages experienced radical changes in their collective lives and their household organization during the nineteenth century. Complex households had developed in these villages in previous centuries, but a series of political, social, and economic changes, starting in the middle decades of the century, combined to make the continuation of the large complex household unfeasible. In the final analysis, the process of transformation of the large and complex households was rooted in economic change, particularly in the arrival of a monetized economy and mercantile capitalism. The cultural values of complex households still existed after the dissolution of the large complex households, and continued to be important well into the twentieth century.

Age heaping patterns in Mosaic data

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the extent and nature of age-misreporting in the Mosaic data, currently one of the largest historical census microdata infrastructures for continental Europe. We use demographic measures known as the age heaping indexes to explore regional, periodic and sex-specific patterns of age misreporting across 115 Mosaic regional datafiles, from Catalonia to Moscow, during Europes demographic ancien régime and thereafter. The papers second significant contribution is the comparison of Mosaic-based results to those derived from two other big census data projects—IPUMS and NAPP. Beyond this exploratory data analysis, we also investigate possible sources of variation in age heaping across Mosaic data by examining how it relates to variability in socioeconomic, institutional, and environmental conditions. Overall, our systematic inquiry into quality of age reporting in Mosaic consolidates the projects potentially transformative role in comparative historical family demography and suggests some avenues for future research.

Real and Synthetic Household Populations and Their Analysis: An Example of Early Historical Census Microdata (Rostock in 1819)

Abstract In this article, the authors describe a validation of methods for dealing with census microdata with no delineated households. The 1819 census of Rostock, Germany, is an enumeration of individuals without household reference. Following a description of this census, the authors test an algorithm that constructs households from individual person records according to a strictly defined set of rules. The rules for assigning people to household units are identified by deducing them from the 1867 census of Rostock, which enumerates individuals within household units. The authors then assess the appropriateness of the algorithms fit to the census of 1819 and conclude with a discussion of the impact of the algorithm on household structures for different groups within the urban population and the strengths and weaknesses of this approach to the construction of synthetic households.