Historical Life Table Construction

Historical life table construction is the craft of converting the patchy mortality evidence of the past—burial registers, family genealogies, monastic obituaries, even skeletal age-at-death distributions—into the formal apparatus of the life table: age-specific death rates, the probability of dying within each age interval, the number of survivors to each age, and expectation of life. The life table descends from John Graunt's 1662 reading of London's Bills of Mortality and Halley's Breslau table, but applying it to historical populations demands special care, since exposures are rarely known and deaths are often recorded without reliable ages. Historians therefore lean heavily on families of model life tables to smooth noisy data and fill missing age bands. Whether built as period tables capturing a single era's mortality or cohort tables following one birth-year group through life, these reconstructions are the indispensable summary of how, and how long, people lived in the past.