Family and Kin as Immediate Providers of Well-being for Its Members -- Marriage and the Kin Network: Evidence from a 19th-Century Italian Community -- Mortality in the Family of Origin and Its Effect on Marriage Partner Selection in a Flemish Village 18th–20th Centuries -- Villages, Descent Groups, Households, and Individual Outcomes in Rural Liaoning, 1789–1909 -- The Importance of Family and Kin over the Life Course -- The Presence of Parents and Childhood Survival: The Passage of Social Time and Differences by Social Class -- When Do Kinsmen Really Help? Examination of Cohort and Parity-Specific Kin Effects on Fertility Behavior. The Case of the Bejsce Parish Register Reconstitution Study, 17th–20th Centuries, Poland -- Places of Life Events as Bequestable Wealth: Family Territory and Migration in France, 19th and 20th Centuries -- Inheritance, Environment, and Mortality in Older Ages, Southern Sweden, 1813–1894 -- Kinship as a Marker of Genetic Proximity -- The Influence of Consanguineous Marriage on Reproductive Behavior and Early Mortality in Northern Coastal Sweden, 1780–1899 -- Postreproductive Longevity in a Natural Fertility Population -- Familial Aggregation of Elderly Cause-Specific Mortality: Analysis of Extended Pedigrees in Utah, 1904–2002 -- Distant Kinship and Founder Effects in the Quebec Population.

What is the influence of family and kinship networks on fertility, marriage, migration and mortality? Population scientists have studied the relationship between families, both immediate and extended, and demographic behavior for many years. This volume highlights the convergence of research by a group of demographers, economic historians, historians, anthropologists, sociologists and geneticists. The contributors use longitudinal databases from different cultures to study families that existed in the past and focus on the role that families and kin groups played in both early and later life events. This book examines the role of kinship and the family’s influence on the health outcomes of their children, their children’s selection of marriage partners, couples having higher order births or reduced fertility, individual migration and origins of populations. Mortality patterns are examined to determine the influence of fertility patterns on parents’ mortality, the contribution of parents’ longevity to their children’s lifespan, and the whether a family history of disease affects the risk of dying from that same disease. This volume emphasizes the importance of studies that include and compare other factors related to social organization with information on multi-generational families. The authors elucidate previous explanations and provide provocative new results. Such intergenerational research is crucial in understanding long term demographic trends and processes.