German towns at the eve of industrialization: household formation and the part of the elderly

Abstract

The present study on household formation and the part of the elderly is based on recently discovered original census material from the states of the former German Customs Union. From the limited number of surviving lists an urban sample has been analyzed for 18461, in comparison with rural areas, towns in Holstein in the census of 1803 and information from later official statistics. This study shows that in pre-industrial towns life-courses were already different from those in the countryside, and that elderly rather lived without kin. These findings are further detailed, and the gender-specific impacts of the urban and rural, pre-industrial and industrial urban environments are discussed. The geographical situation of the towns is revealed to be even more important than their size. It influenced the age at marriage and household formation, though the regional background was not decisive for the living arrangements in towns, which nevertheless clearly showed common characteristics independently from their rural context.

Keywords::

• urban demography
• German censuses
• gender-specific life-courses
• household forms
• aged persons

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Corrigendum

Notes

^1. The data collection has been generously supported by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, and especially by its director, Joshua R. Goldstein, who launched the project and always showed a great interest in it; furthermore, by its Laboratory of Historical Demography where the data will be kept accessible as part of the MOSAIC-project. I wish to express my acknowledgements to Siegfried Gruber and Mikołaj Szołtysek for their helpful cooperation and inspiring discussions.

^2. The problem of the German stem family is not in focus here. Otherwise the Laslett-Hammel-classification and its application, especially in relation to the distinction between family household, houseful and the farmstead as a compound would have been discussed.

^3. It must be noted that the partner of the old person may have been younger, so that the parents had to care for children under the normal age of leaving home. But as has been shown, children left relatively early, when there was really a nuclear-family system with life-cycle domestic service.