The history of family and community life through the study of civil registers: Paros in the 20th century

Abstract

A plenitude of information can be shed on family history and community life by studying civil registers. The case study here is the island of Paros in the period 1894–1997. This period of one century saw the transformation of the insular rural society to one dominated by the third-sector economy and the passage from illiteracy to total literacy. These structural socio-economic changes influenced the timing at which people were procreating, marrying and even dying. The labour-intensive hard work in the fields, as well as religious regulations, had shaped a highly seasonal pattern in conceptions and consequently in births, which was in action well into the first half of the twentieth century, but is attenuating as we approach the present day. Marriage remains a seasonal phenomenon in the examined population (although not to the extent it used to be) because the canon rules of the Orthodox Church are still determining the timing of weddings. Mortality was highly seasonal for infants and children up to the 1940s, revealing that certain diseases (mainly diarrhoea and contagious diseases) were striking at certain periods of the year, while adult mortality presents a different seasonal pattern. Causes of death, which are available from civil registers, were used to explain the seasonal variations of deaths. Civil registers are also used to study the famine which struck the island (along with the rest of Greece) in 1941–42 as a direct effect of the Second World War.

Keywords::

• seasonal pattern
• annual working cycle
• religious regulations
• socio-economic change

Notes

^1. The economic structure of a society is defined mainly by the participation of the workforce in each of the three major sectors of the economy. The primary sector comprises agriculture, grazing, trapping, forestry, fishing and mining. The secondary sector involves the transformation of raw materials into goods, for example manufacturing steel into cars, or textiles into clothing. Activities in the tertiary sector of the economy include the provision of services and commerce (wholesale and retail trade) (Kenessey, 1987).