Local Population Studies 111

Issue 111 of Local Population Studies is now available for members and subscribers to read and download from this page of this web site. Hard copies are being printed and will be mailed as soon as possible to those who have paid for printed copies.

Books available

The Local Population Studies Society has been contacted by Prof. Alan Armstrong about his book collection, and whether anyone would be interested in acquiring it. The collection consists of about 110 items, including Flinn on Scotland, Connell on Ireland, Drake on Norway, R. Woods and N. Shelton, Atlas of Victorian Mortality (Liverpool, 1997); and the complete 13 volume set of Pioneers of Demography in facsimile form published by Gregg International. He also has a set of copies of Local Population Studies comprising issues 1-90. He is looking for a small financial recompense for them.

Prof. Armstrong is based in Kent, and it may be that the collection will need to be transported from Kent by the purchaser.

If anyone is interested in acquiring any of these publications, please contact the Editor of Local Population Studies (PRAHinde@aol.com) in the first instance. We should perhaps add that the ‘official’ archive of hard copies of Local Population Studies, which is currently held at the house of the Editor, is missing issues 1-6 and 8-10, so the Editor is hoping to acquire these from Prof. Armstrong’s collection.

Some readers will remember Prof. Armstrong from his work on the history of Kent and Norfolk, as well as his book Farmworkers: a Social and Economic History 1770-1980 (London, 1988); and the occupational classification scheme he presented in the volume edited by Tony Wrigley in 1972: W.A. Armstrong, ‘The use of information about occupation’, in E.A. Wrigley (ed.) Nineteenth-Century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 191-310. The latter was based on the late-nineteenth-century occupational classification scheme of Charles Booth and became known as the ‘Booth-Armstrong’ scheme. It was a standard approach for some decades.

Local Population Studies prize

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the Local Population Studies prize for issues of the journal dated 2022 is Dr Sadie McMullon for her article:

‘Marriage horizons in Fletton 1891-1911: the hidden narrative behind the parish marriage registers’, Local Population Studies 108, pp. 13-34.

Congratulations to Sadie!

The prize will be awarded again for the best article published in issues dated 2023 (issues 110 and 111) and again for the best article published in issues 112 and 113. Entries are welcome from eligible authors, which are students (at any stage of study), early-career researchers based at a university or college (within five years of completing a PhD), or non-university-based researchers.

CAMPOP turns 60!

The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (CAMPOP) will turn 60 on 11 July 2024. To celebrate we are launching an anniversary blog series ‘60 things you never knew about family, sex, marriage, work and death’. The blogs will be made available weekly from 11 July on the CAMPOP website: https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/.

Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) launch

The new I-CeM website (https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/icem/) was launched with an in-person event at the Geography department, University of Cambridge on 19 June 2024. Prof. Kevin Schürer and Dr Alex Wakelam gave presentations explaining the origins and development of the I-CeM project, which now includes the 1921 Census and Scotland as well as England and Wales. The Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) is a collection of individual-level census data for Great Britain covering the period 1851 to 1921. The underlying raw census data have been enhanced through the creation of multiple coded and standardised derived variables which have been specially designed to facilitate comparative analyses over time.

By making available to academic researchers detailed information about everyone resident in the country, collected at decennial censuses from 1851 to 1921, the I-CeM data collection⸺one of the largest of its kind in the world⸺has transformed the landscape for research work in the economic, social, and demographic history of this country during a period of profound change in the wake of the industrial revolution.

New CAMPOP Economic and Social Research Council project on historical malaria

CAMPOP members Romola Davenport, Max Satchell and Mathias Ingholt have just started a new Economic and Social Research Council funded project to understand the demographic and cultural impacts of endemic malaria in England and Denmark: https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/malaria/.

As part of the project we will compare mortality patterns in in marsh and non-marsh areas using baptism: burial ratios and the seasonality of burials. For this we need to augment Wrigley and Schofield’s counts of burials and baptisms (the 404 collection: see http://www.localpopulationstudies.org.uk/the-404plus-project/), especially for Lincolnshire. If you are interested in studying Lincolnshire and Fen communities and would like to get involved then please contact Romola rjd23@cam.ac.uk.

Launch of Economies Past

A new CAMPOP website, https://www.economiespast.org, has been launched. This web site maps what people did all day. Over the last 20 years, a team of researchers led by Leigh Shaw-Taylor (co-director of CAMPOP) has collected millions of records to build, for England and Wales, the most detailed quantitative picture of long-run economic development ever assembled anywhere in the world. The data concern occupational structure, which refers to the distribution of men and women through different economic activities. The website allows users to map occupational structure over the period 1600-1911.

Open call to help map out London history

A CAMPOP crowd-sourcing project has been launched to map properties insured against fire in London from the 1690s to the 1860s, now in the archive of the Aviva insurance company. Aviva’s archive contains more than 325 years of insurance history. After more than two years of digitisation, covering around 550,000 policy entries, this vast resource is now helping to build a clearer picture of how London looked hundreds of years ago. The project invites people to plot a digital map of properties insured in London from the 1690s to the 1860s, from mansions and hospitals to workshops and poorhouses. Users can easily search extracts of the digitised policies (transcribed by an automated handwriting recognition tool) for references to the parish, road name or other geographical markers (for example ‘west of the Tower’) in order to locate buildings.
For more information see https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/news/open-call-help-map-out-london-history and https://amicablecontributors.com/.