The intergenerational transmission of fertility in rural Holland 1850-1940

Did the transition to low fertility in Europe involve an intergenerational diffusion of fertility control from mothers to daughters (or, more generally, from parents to children)? This obvious question has often been raised in historical demography, but empirical answers are surprisingly hard to find. The diffusion of fertility control since the latter part of the 19th century has typically been investigated within successive generations rather than between interconnected generations. One of the reasons may be the scarcity of good quality genealogical data. Indeed, in order to study intergenerational fertility, we need interlinked family reconstitutions for at least two generations; for the parental and the child generation; or, from the perspective of children, of the family of orientation to their own family of procreation. Many family reconstitutions include more than one generation or marriage cohort, but typically these reconstitutions are not interlinked between each other. Exceptions include the Mormon Historical Demography Project and the BALSAC database, both covering regions in Northern America.
In this paper, we use family reconstitutions for two interlinked generations originating from the Dutch village of Akersloot, in the province of Noord-Holland, the Netherlands. The first generation includes first marriages concluded between 1830 and 1879 (N=about 250). The second generation involves all surviving children born to the first one. We apply multilevel regression techniques in order to model both the relevance of family of orientation (including size) and individual characteristics for the family of procreation. In contrast to earlier studies, we analyse not only completed but also incomplete families, because completed families are a selective part (often a minority) of the population. In order to do so, we decompose achieved family sizes into three components: starting, spacing, and stopping. To what extent were marriage ages or ages at first birth inherited? Were parity progression rates transmitted from parents to children? Did early stopping in the parental generation significantly influence stopping in the second?