Richard Smith
It is commonplace to assume that, traditionally, care for older adults has been the responsibility of family members, and was provided within the extended family – implying that elderly persons spent their declining years under the same roof as their married children. But work at Campop has shown that this residential arrangement was not actually the norm in the British past.
Alice Reid & Jim Oeppen
Looking backwards in time gives a mistaken impression that family sizes in the past were larger than they actually were. This blog explains why this happens, and explores the differences between the picture of the past painted by genealogies and the past as it actually was.
Alice Reid
Today most of the world’s population lives in places where, on average, women have fewer than two children over their lifetime, but this level of childbearing is a relatively recent phenomenon.
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The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure