Compare methods

	Historical Life Table Construction	Family Reconstitution
Field	Historical Demography	Historical Demography
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1662	1956
Originator	John Graunt (origins); Coale, Demeny, Ledermann (model life tables); applied by Wrigley-Schofield and Bengtsson	Louis Henry and Michel Fleury; refined by E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield (Cambridge Group)
Type	Mortality estimation and survivorship modelling	Nominative record-linkage and demographic estimation
Seminal source	Wrigley, E. A., & Schofield, R. S. (1981). The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction. Edward Arnold / Harvard University Press. ISBN: 9780674690073	Wrigley, E. A., Davies, R. S., Oeppen, J. E., & Schofield, R. S. (1997). English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580-1837. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 9780521590150
Aliases	Historical mortality table building, Model life table fitting, Survivorship reconstruction, Paleodemographic life tables	Parish register reconstitution, Nominative family linkage, Henry-Fleury method, Cambridge Group reconstitution
Related	4	4
Summary	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.	Family reconstitution is the nominative technique that rebuilds the demographic experience of historical communities by linking individual baptism, marriage and burial entries from parish registers into the reproductive and mortality histories of identifiable families. Developed by Louis Henry and Michel Fleury in 1950s France and brought to its fullest expression by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure under Wrigley and Schofield, the method transforms an undifferentiated stream of vital events into Family Reconstitution Forms, each documenting a marriage, the births of children, and the deaths of family members. From these forms the analyst derives age-specific fertility, age at marriage, birth intervals, infant and child mortality, and adult survivorship. Because it works at the individual level it can isolate demographic behaviours—such as spacing or stopping—invisible to aggregate counts, making it the gold standard for pre-census population history.