This award will support a collaborative project in historical demography between two groups of U.S. and Swedish researchers. The U.S. group will be led by Dr. Katherine Lynch, Department of History, Carnegie Mellon University. The Swedish group will be headed by Dr. Lars-Goran Tedebrand, Department of Historical Demography, University of Umea. The project involves an interdis- ciplinary study, using a unique historical-demographic data base being built at the University of Umea, Sweden. Research by group members, to be undertaken in collaboration with historians and statisticians at Umea, will use individual-level vital registration and household data to test propositions about infant and child mortality, changes in the incidence and timing of life-course events and other important demographic consequences associated with the dual processes of industrialization and social modernization in the nineteenth century. The Demographic Data Base, housed at the University of Umea, is one of the most important data bases available to historical demo- graphers, currently containing information on over 220,000 individuals, mainly for the nineteenth century. The value of the Data Base lies particularly in the fact that it contains a wide variety of information on named individuals as they passed through the events of birth, marriage, death and migration; and, in addition, stores information on those same individuals' families. The Data Base information on individuals, drawn from Sweden's nearly unique "church examination records," thus captures both the longitudinal and cross-sectional features of demographic life much as modern vital registration and census records do. In addition to analyzing the data to develop predictors of infant and early childhood mortality, the researchers will exchange innovative computer software designed at Carnegie Mellon University to display and manipulate additional demographic time series data. Both the US and Swedish teams are highly qualified to carry out this research. The results are likely to have a substantial impact on progress in the fields of historical demography and social history, both from a substantive and methodological point of view.
