Van geboortebank tot collaboratory
Een reflectie op twintig jaar dataverzameling en onderzoek met de HSN
Jan Kok, Kees Mandemakers en Hilde Bras
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From a database of births to a collaboratory. A reflection on twenty years of data collection and research with the HSN dataset
In 1989 the initiative of the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (hsn) was presented to the scientific community. We discuss the development of the database and we go into the question what kind of research the founders of the hsn had in mind and to what extent this has been realized the last twenty years.
While doing this, we realize that the hsn does not operate in a vacuum but stands in the centre of the scientific development. In this article we evaluate the 200 publications based on hsn-material which have appeared till now. We will discuss how new roads have been taken, especially in the fields of life course studies and studies of the family.

Oversterfte van jonge meisjes in Nederland in de negentiende en eerste helft twintigste eeuw
Frans van Poppel, Jona Schellekens en Evelien Walhout
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Excess mortality of girls in the Netherlands in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries
Until the late 1930s, almost all European countries were characterized by excess female mortality during childhood and adolescence. Most historical research on this topic has focused on excess female mortality in a rural setting, making use of published statistical data only. In our paper we study sex differences in mortality in age groups 1-19 in the period 1850-1930 by making use of individual level data for the Netherlands as a whole. We focus on the question whether culture (religion), social class and place of residence had an effect on the level of excess mortality. The main conclusion is that excess mortality was a phenomenon that was observed only among children of unskilled workers. Living in an agrarian region or having been born and raised in a peasant family were not associated with higher female death risks. We suggest that this more favorable position of girls is a consequence of the dominant position of small family farms, the preponderance of mixed or dairy farming, the well-integrated position of women in market production and more generally, the higher degree of equality between men and women.

Sibling en scholing. Het effect van geslacht en van gezinssamenstelling op geletterdheid in Nederland in de tweede helft van de negentiende eeuw
Mattijs Vandezande en Koen Matthijs
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Sibling and schooling. The effect of sex and family composition on literacy in the Netherlands in the second half of the nineteenth century
During the nineteenth century illiteracy declined to the level of almost non-existence. Much attention has already been paid to how a child’s life circumstances affect his or her ability to write. Most research does not go beyond the household or aggregate level. This study aims to explore differences in literacy within a household. We expected literacy to be much higher among sons and children with a lower birth order. More boys are literate than girls, and especially in large families the oldest children are advantaged. However, we found girls to be more literate when they had older sisters. We therefore believe there are different gender specific mechanisms at work which can explain literacy variations within a household.

De rol van vrouwen in de eerste demografische transitie in Nederland. Een vergelijking van twee textielsteden
Angélique Janssens
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The role of women during the first demographic transition. A comparison of two textile cities
This article focuses on the influence of women’s labour market experience prior to marriage and her educational attainment on women’s reproductive patterns in two textile towns in the Netherlands, Enschede and Tilburg, between 1880 and 1960. Two hypotheses are tested in this article. The first one is the Gittin’s thesis that female factory workers were frontrunners in bringing fertility levels down to more modern levels. The second hypothesis tested in this article assumes that higher educational attainment increases women’s empowerment and thereby leads women to reduce family size. The analysis is based on life course data from Dutch population registers on two cohorts of Dutch women born in Enschede and Tilburg in 1881-1885 and 1911-1915 respectively and employs complex event history techniques. It is demonstrated that neither female factory workers nor women in higher occupations were demographic innovators. Domestic servants as well as seamstresses by contrast were showing more restrictive reproduction patterns. The analysis also demonstrates the overriding importance of religion and the way in which more orthodox religions enabled women to only gradually accept modern birth control methods.

Uitzwermen of samenklitten? De ruimtelijke spreiding van broers en zussen over stad en land van Noord-Holland, 1850-1940
Jan Kok en Hilde Bras
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Swarming out or sticking together? The dispersal of siblings in the North-Holland countryside, 1850-1940
Why were some families scattered over a larger area than others? In this article we use a dataset with the complete life courses of all siblings originating from 210 families, whose parents married in the same village in the commercialized North-western part of the Netherlands in order to discover the determinants of sibling dispersal. Using multinomial logistic regression, we found that the survival status of the parents, the civil status of the siblings and the size and gender composition of the sibling set were the most important factors behind dispersal patterns.

“Je zoudt maar last van mij hebben” Verwanten in het Nederlandse huishouden, 1860-1940
Jan Kok en Kees Mandemakers
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“I would only be a burden to you”. Co-resident kin in Dutch households, 1860-1940
This article studies regional and social differentiation in extended households in The Netherlands, measured at the birth of the hsn research persons. Between ten to fifteen percent of their native families were extended, multiple families were very rare. After a short peak in the 1870s, a secular decline in extended households set in. Kin co-residence declined faster in the cities than in the countryside. Not surprisingly, extended households occurred most frequent among farmers, who always could use an extra hand on the farm. In the eastern part of the country, co-residency was very common. Here, impartible inheritance rules prevailed and the heir was obliged to take in his parents as well as his unmarried siblings.