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Multiple births strain mothers' and families' resources in ways that should highlight preferences for family size, birth spacing, and parity-dependent stopping behavior. Couples with surviving twins reach their target family size sooner than other couples and should be more likely to practice family limitation. Twins are also a greater burden on the mother's time and health, which could lead to postponing the next birth, even among couples who want additional children. We examine these hypotheses by analyzing families with twins in the 1900 and 1910 U.S. Censuses. Using reconstructed birth histories for more than 7 million women in the IPUMS full-count 1900 and 1910 datasets and event-history methods (Kaplan-Meier curves, cure models), we find clear evidence of family limitation following a multiple birth. Couples who had twins or triplets were more likely to stop childbearing, and those who continued having children delayed their next birth. Responses to multiple births were larger in groups previously identified as leaders in the transition to smaller families, and roughly one third of couples stopped after one or two children. We find no evidence that some groups relied primarily on birth spacing to reduce family size while others relied primarily on stopping., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors.)

With only a few exceptions, the historical study of individual-level correlates of child mortality in the United States has been limited to the period surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, when children ever born and children surviving data collected by the 1900 and 1910 censuses allow indirect estimation of child mortality. The recent release of linked census data, such as the IPUMS MLP datasets, allows a different type of indirect estimation over a longer period. By following couples across subsequent decennial censuses, it is possible to infer child mortality by measuring whether couples' own children in the first census were still present in the second census. We focus our analysis on children aged 1-3 in the first of two linked censuses, who were less likely to be undercounted by the census than infants, and unlikely to be living apart from their parents in the second census. We estimate child mortality over the intervening decade and use OLS regression to correlate that mortality to the residence location and socioeconomic characteristics of their parents' households. We limit our analysis to three panel datasets for married couples linked between the 1850-60, 1860-70, and 1870-80 censuses, when real estate and personal estate wealth data were collected. Our results indicate a significant negative relationship between wealth and child mortality across all regions of the United States and over the entire period examined.

A growing body of research considers racial residential segregation to be a form of systemic racism and a fundamental cause of persistent racial disparities in health and mortality. Historical research examining the impact of segregation on health and mortality, however, is limited to a few studies with poor data and inconsistent results. In this study, we examine the association between racial residential segregation and child mortality in the South at the turn of the 20th century. We rely on the new IPUMS 1900 and 1910 complete-count databases to estimate child mortality in the 5 years before each census and construct segregation measures at the census enumeration district (ED), the lowest level of geography consistently available in the census. We calculate the proportion of households headed by Black individuals in each ED, and the Sequence Index of Segregation ( SIS ), which is based on the racial sequencing of household heads within each district. We construct models of child mortality for rural and urban areas, controlling for a wide variety of demographic and socioeconomic variables. The results indicate that proportion Black and SIS were strongly and positively associated with the mortality of Black children in most models and in both rural and urban areas. Proportion Black was also positively but more moderately correlated with the mortality of White children, while SIS was not correlated or negatively correlated. These results suggest that racial segregation was a long-standing fundamental cause of race disparities in health and mortality in the United States., Competing Interests: CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Children require a large amount of time, effort, and resources to raise. Physical help, financial contributions, medical care, and other types of assistance from kin and social network members allow couples to space births closer together while maintaining or increasing child survival. We examine the impact of kin availability on couples' reproductive success in the early twentieth-century United States with a panel data set of over 3.1 million couples linked between the 1900 and 1910 U.S. censuses. Our results indicate that kin proximity outside the household was positively associated with fertility, child survival, and net reproduction, and suggest that declining kin availability was an important contributing factor to the fertility transition in the United States. We also find important differences between maternal and paternal kin inside the household-including higher fertility among women residing with their mother-in-law than among those residing with their mother-that support hypotheses related to the contrasting motivations and concerns of parents and parents-in-law., (Copyright © 2021 The Authors.)

The U. S. fertility transition in the nineteenth century is unusual. Not only did it start from a very high fertility level and very early in the nation's development, but it also took place long before the nation's mortality transition, industrialization, and urbanization. This paper assembles new county-level, household-level, and individual-level data, including new complete-count IPUMS microdata databases of the 1830-1880 censuses, to evaluate different theories for the nineteenth-century American fertility transition. We construct cross-sectional models of net fertility for currently-married white couples in census years 1830-1880 and test the results with a subset of couples linked between the 1850-1860, 1860-1870, and 1870-1880 censuses. We find evidence of marital fertility control consistent with hypotheses as early as 1830. The results indicate support for several different but complementary theories of the early U.S. fertility decline, including the land availability, conventional structuralist, ideational, child demand/quality-quantity tradeoff, and life-cycle savings theories.

The societal integration of immigrants is a great concern in many of today's Western societies, and has been so for a long time. Whether we look at Europe in 2015 or the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, large flows of immigrants pose challenges to receiving societies. While much research has focused on the socioeconomic integration of immigrants there has been less interest in their demographic integration, even though this can tell us as much about the way immigrants fare in their new home country. In this paper we study the disparities in infant and child mortality across nativity groups and generations, using new, high-density census data. In addition to describing differentials and trends in child mortality among 14 immigrant groups relative to the native-born white population of native parentage, we focus special attention on the association between child mortality, immigrant assimilation, and the community-level context of where immigrants lived. Our findings indicate substantial nativity differences in child mortality, but also that factors related to the societal integration of immigrants explains a substantial part of these differentials. Our results also point to the importance of spatial patterns and contextual variables in understanding nativity differentials in child mortality.

This paper describes a method to reconstruct complete birth histories for women in the 1900 and 1910 U. S. census IPUMS samples. The method is an extension of an earlier method developed by Luther and Cho (1988). The basic method relies on the number of children ever born, number of children surviving, number of children coresident in the household and age-specific fertility rates for the population to probabilistically assign an "age" to deceased and unmatched children. Modifications include the addition of an iterative Poisson regression model to fine-tune age-specific fertility inputs. The potential of complete birth histories for the study of the U.S. fertility transition is illustrated with a few examples.

This research note describes the growth of the slave population in the United States and develops several new measures of its size and growth, including an estimate of the total number of slaves who ever lived in the United States. Estimates of the number of births and slave imports are provided in ten-year increments between 1619 and 1860 and in one-year increments between 1861 and 1865. The results highlight the importance of natural increase to the rapid growth of the U.S. slave population and indicate that approximately 10 million slaves lived in the United States, where they contributed 410 billion hours of labor. A concluding discussion highlights a few descriptive statistics historians might find useful, including the cumulative number of slaves who lived in the United States by decade and the proportion of slaves who were living at various moments in U.S. history, including shortly after the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 and at the start of the American Civil War in 1861.

Between 1835 and 1935, total fertility in the United States fell from 7.0 to 2.1. New IPUMS complete-count microdata databases of the 1850, 1880, 1910, and 1930 U. S. censuses allow us to study the fertility decline in more detail than previously possible. We construct comprehensive models of couples' fertility incorporating a wide variety of economic, social, cultural and familial factors, including measures of parental religiosity and kin availability outside of the household. The results indicate that while shifts in the occupational structure and increasing urbanization of the population provide the most consistent and substantive contribution to fertility decline over the period, cultural and religious attitudes - as proxied by parents' nativities and child naming practices - played a major role in couples' childbearing decisions.

Methods: Most quantitative research on fertility decline in the United States ignores the potential impact of cultural and familial factors. We rely on new complete-count data from the 1880 U.S. census to construct couple-level measures of nativity/ethnicity, religiosity, and kin availability. We include these measures with a comprehensive set of demographic, economic, and contextual variables in Poisson regression models of net marital fertility to assess their relative importance. We construct models with and without area fixed effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity., Contribution: All else being equal, we find a strong impact of nativity on recent net marital fertility. Fertility differentials among second generation couples relative to the native-born white population of native parentage were in most cases less than half of the differential observed among first generation immigrants, suggesting greater assimilation to native-born American childbearing norms. Our measures of parental religiosity and familial propinquity indicated a more modest impact on marital fertility. Couples who chose biblical names for their children had approximately 3% more children than couples relying on secular names while the presence of a potential mother-in-law in a nearby households was associated with 2% more children. Overall, our results demonstrate the need for more inclusive models of fertility behavior that include cultural and familial covariates.

This study relies on IPUMS samples of the 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses, aggregate census data, and the timing of state laws criminalizing abortion to construct regional estimates of marital fertility in the United States and estimate correlates of marital fertility. The results show a significant lag between the onset of marital fertility decline in the nation's northeastern census divisions and its onset in western and southern census divisions. Empirical models indicate the presence of cultural, economic, and legal impediments to the diffusion of marital fertility control and illustrate the need for more inclusive models of fertility decline.

We used micro-level data from the censuses of 1900 to investigate the impact of socio-economic status on net fertility during the fertility transition in five Northern American and European countries (Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and the USA). The study is therefore unlike most previous research on the historical fertility transition, which used aggregate data to examine economic correlates of demographic behaviour at regional or national levels. Our data included information on number of children by age, occupation of the mother and father, place of residence, and household context. The results show highly similar patterns across countries, with the elite and upper middle classes having considerably lower net fertility early in the transition. These patterns remain after controlling for a range of individual and community-level fertility determinants and geographical unobserved heterogeneity.

New evidence from the Utah Population Database (UPDP) reveals that at the onset of the fertility transition, reproductive behavior was transmitted across generations - between women and their mothers, as well as between women and their husbands' family of origin. Age at marriage, age at last birth, and the number of children ever born are positively correlated in the data, most strongly among first-born daughters and among cohorts born later in the fertility transition. Intergenerational ties, including the presence of mothers and mothers-in-law, influenced the hazard of progressing to a next birth. The findings suggest that the practice of parity-dependent marital fertility control and inter-birth spacing behavior derived, in part, from the previous generation and that the potential for mothers and mothers-in-law to help in the rearing of children encouraged higher marital fertility.

This article constructs new life tables for the white population of the United States in each decade between 1790 and 1900. Drawing from several recent studies, it suggests best estimates of life expectancy at age 20 for each decade. These estimates are fitted to new standards derived from the 1900-02 rural and 1900-02 overall DRA life tables using a two-parameter logit model with fixed slope. The resulting decennial life tables more accurately represent sex-and age-specific mortality rates while capturing known mortality trends.

In this article, I rely on new estimates of nineteenth-century mortality and the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series to construct new estimates of white fertility in the nineteenth-century United States. Unlike previous estimates that showed a long-term decline in overall fertility beginning at or before the turn of the nineteenth century, the new estimates suggest that U.S. fertility did not begin its secular decline until circa 1840. Moreover, new estimates of white marital fertility, based on "own-children" methods, suggest that the decline in marital fertility did not begin in the nation as a whole until after the Civil War (1861-1865).