Demographic Change and Development Using Crowdsourced Genealogies (April 2022) [PDF] [slides] [twitter thread]
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Abstract This research draws on a novel historical dataset crowdsourced from publicly available genealogies on geni.com to study demographic change and development in the past. Using millions of lineages of ordinary individuals in Europe, I reconstruct fertility, identify migration in and out of urban centers, and provide novel measures and stylized facts in periods without census. I carefully show that selection into the data is limited from the mid-seventeenth century onwards by systematically comparing fertility, mortality, and urbanization in the genealogies to census or representative data in thirty different countries. Then, as an illustration of what can be done, I document known patterns of demographic change and development using the genealogies. Finally, I present novel findings and stylized facts showing that substantial distributional and secular changes took hold in the eighteenth century, during the early stages of the transition from stagnation to growth.
Supplementary materials: online appendix & data (available soon)
Supplementary figures: selection at the country level for urbanization, fertility, and mortality (also in Appendix 2) Presentations: Brown, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Oxford, PAA, TSE, Zurich |
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