This article focuses on the importance of employment and educational roles for children in understanding major aspects of the American fertility transition of the late 1800s. It views the declining economic contribution of children to family income and the increased short-run costs of children from schooling as important factors in explaining variations in marital fertility among parts of the United States, and also for understanding the general downward trend of fertility in the late 1800s.

Data on children ever born from the 1910 census are used to analyze variations across states in childbearing among two cohorts of married white women. One cohort (those 70-74 years of age in 1910) did most of their childbearing in the period after the Civil War; while the younger cohort (40-44 in 1910) re-produced mainly in the period just before the turn of the century. Relationships between reproductive behavior of individual mothers and their own children’s roles will also be investigated through a sample of the 1900 manuscript census, based on a 1 in 750 household sample of the 1900 manuscript census (Graham, 1980). Special attention will be devoted to urban-rural variation in the effect of children’s activities on fertility.

Seventy-three years ago pioneer American medievalist Dana Carlton Munro (1911: 504) delivered a paper in Philadelphia to the American Philosophical Society entitled “The Cost of Living in the Twelfth Century.” He threw down the gauntlet by concluding that

This article takes up this challenge with new material on the cost of living in Italy in the twelfth century.

Our knowledge of economic progress for early Ohioans is limited because it is so difficult to trace successfully given individuals from year to year, let alone from decade to decade. If we start with the names of a dozen men, we often lose the genealogical trail of half of them before the search has progressed more than a few years. That is why we should welcome any solid evidence of tracings for any large subset of Ohio’s population, as presented on its tax duplicate for given years. Such evidence can teach us a great deal about the number of propertyholders who remained in Ohio over a period of of time, how many moved on, how many died, and something about their material progress.

Over a period of many years, Dr. Gerald Petty of Columbus has recorded information on taxpayers in Ohio and has provided me with punched cards and computer tapes for all taxpayers on the Ohio tax duplicates for the years 1810 and 1825. These duplicates are township and county lists of the names of taxpayers, details of their properties, and their tax assessments. These data describe 4.3 million acres in 1810 and 14.7 million in 1825, a sizable leap in development for this frontier state; by the time of its first federal census of agriculture in 1850, Ohio had recorded 18.0 million acres. In the 15-year period between 1810 and 1825, the number of propertyholders grew from 14,098 to 51,506. The purpose of this article is to report how many from the original group could be found among the latter number, and to say something about material progress in those cases where names could be matched. This study provides some fundamental knowledge about the early economic development as well as the levels of wealth inequality in Ohio.

The central interest of this article is to describe the interrelationship of fertility patterns with occupational structure for a sample of married couples in one maritime community—Nantucket, Massachusetts—over a period of nearly 200 years. Marital fertility declined substantially in Nantucket from its first white settlement in 1660 to 1850. During this time the whaling industry was undergoing intervals of expansion, prosperity, virtual destruction, and renewal, eventually failing to recover from a long decline that began in the 1840s. An explanation of the observed Falls in fertility is not possible without reference to trends in the whaling industry, as this article attempts to demonstrate.

A sustained decline in American fertility rates from at least 1800 and perhaps earlier has been documented (Coale and Zelnik, 1963; Easterlin, 1971, 1976a, 1976b; Forster and Tucker, 1972; Vinovskis, 1976; Yasuba, 1962). Causes of the decline may include the changing availability of farmland, urbanization and industrialization, literacy, and such demographic factors as a decline in mortality, changes in the sex ratio at marriageable ages, and ethnic composition. A number of researchers have even suggested that Falls in family size were at least partly due to deliberate attempts by individual couples not to exceed their desired number of children (Kantrow, 1980; Osterud and Fulton, 1976; Temkin-Greener and Swedlund, 1978; Wells, 1971). For Nantucket in particular, Byers (1982) also presented evidence for a substantial fertility decline from 1680 to 1840, claiming that his findings “demonstrate community-wide acceptance of voluntary fertility control.” The present study, in contrast, found no evidence of deliberate fertility control in Nantucket.

A friend and colleague of an author reviews a two-volume history. Acknowledging his relationship with the author the reviewer calls the books “excellent, full of rich new insights, sparkling with intelligence, the sentiment which underlies our empassioned love for the historian’s craft, one of the most beautiful of the discplines devoted to the study of man.” “Yet,” the reviewer continues, “it is striking that the individual is almost entirely absent…. Psychology, although not totally ignored, is always collective psychology.…Is not the author,” the review continues, “turning back to the schematic.…toward the sociological, a seductive form of the abstract?” (Febvre, 1941b: 177, 128).

Sit back and imagine the time, place, and people involved in this story: a 1980s traditional historian, perhaps a radical people’s historian, excoriating a social scientific colleague? Not at all; this is no case of contemporary backlash. The time was 1941, the review Lucien Febvre, the author Marc Bloch, the book, La société féodale.

From their recent analysis of the relationship between place of enlistment and place of birth of eighteenth-century American militiamen, Villaflor and Sokoloff (1982: 542-543; 559-560) concluded that “a high level of mobility stands out,” a finding that they note is now “a commonplace both in the discipline of American history and in studies of pre-industrial communities.” While these empirical studies have surely refuted the romantic belief in the permanence of all of the personnel of preindustrial localities, they have not demonstrated that mobility was uniformly “high” everywhere. Imprecision in comparing the rates of mobility in two places is inevitable without a comparable index of the extent of movement.

Villaflor and Sokoloff (1982) implicitly reject the notion of a “mobility transition,” a construct that associates higher rates of internal migration with more rapid rates of economic growth (Zelinsky, 1971), which Jones (1981) discerned in his comparison of the handful of studies of local population persistence in the colonial period with those for the nineteenth century. They realize, however, that a precise comparison of the place of enlistment with the birthplace of young men of an average age of 24 with the proportion of adult males who appear on two successive decennial censuses is not possible.