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The Populations Past website provides data from across England and Wales from 1851 to 1911
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Family historians can explore census results and other records by local area for a 60-year period using a recently launched website.
Populations Past ( populationspast.org) was created as an outreach project by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (CAMPOP).
Researchers can select the years 1851, 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901 and 1911 on a map of England and Wales divided into about 2,000 census registration subdistricts. They can then view detailed breakdowns of population data for each year in each area.
The map shows the population density of each subdistrict and its place type according to the main profession, including mining, textile, rural and professional areas. It then provides a detailed breakdown of 48 population factors, grouped into 10 categories: fertility; marriage; mortality and health; households; age structure; migration; socio-economic status; social class; women’s work; and children’s work and schooling.
Family historians can explore factors in the area where their ancestors lived such as the infant mortality rate, the total fertility rate and the average age at marriage for men and women. The website also allows them to compare different maps side by side, and download the data.
“We wanted to have a means of outreach,” Dr Alice Reid of the University of Cambridge’s Geography Department told Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine. “We wanted to share our findings, and thought a website was a better way to do this than an atlas. You can see the bigger impact, and drill down to the complicated variation between small areas.”
The website is based on data produced by the Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) project, an analysis of historic census results led by professors from the Universities of Leicester and Essex.
Dr Reid leads the Atlas of Victorian Fertility Decline project, a collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge and Essex that analyses the I-CeM data and the published annual and quarterly returns of the registrar general to identify how factors such as age, occupation and marital status affected fertility, and chart fluctuations in births, marriages and infant mortality.
There was a dramatic decline in fertility (the number of live births occurring in a population) from about 1870 to a low point in the 1930s. Dr Reid explained that the project provided the first opportunity to calculate age-specific fertility rates during this period using the census and other data.
It was previously assumed that the fall in fertility happened because of a rise in ‘stopping’ behaviour, where couples plan to have a certain number of children and then stop. This would have shown as a lower fertility rate among older women. However, the project instead found reduced fertility among women of all ages, suggesting a general desire to have fewer children.
The map provides a number of other insights into how society was shaped by demographic change, including industrialisation. For example, Dr Reid said that mining and textile areas both had “distinct demographics”. Mining areas had high fertility rates and high infant mortality rates, while textile areas had high infant mortality but low fertility, due in part to the large numbers of working women who were unable to marry or have children.
You can see the bigger impact, and drill down to the variation between small areas