Family Reconstitution

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.