Marriage, residence, and occupational choices of senior and junior siblings in the english past

Abstract

Even when parents had few resources to transfer to their children, the dynamics of the family life-cycle may serve to advance the occupational, residence and marriage careers of certain children and hinder the careers of others. This hypothesis is tested by calculating for a number of small English communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the proportions of children, ranked according to their position in the birth order at the time of the census, who were resident in the parish of their parents. The data suggest that even when parents had few resources and their children made their own way in life, certain differences in residence and marriage patterns and in occupational histories were associated with specific birth ranks.