It is now well established that the reduction in fertility associated with the demographic transition in Europe was primarily a matter of changing reproductive behavior within marriage. While non-marital fertility also declined during the period of fertility change, it never constituted a large proportion of overall fertility, except in a few regions. Moreover, to the extent that nuptiality changed during the period of fertility decline, it generally increased, thereby counteracting rather than facilitating the trend to lower levels of reproduction.

In the sample of German villages on which this study is based, non-marital fertility has not been measured directly. However, the rise in illegitimacy ratios and their subsequent decline after the mid-nineteenth century probably reflect corresponding trends in non-marital reproduction. Even at their peak, illegitimate births never represented as much as 15 percent of all births, at least for the six fully-coded villages. Data on age at first marriage suggest that changes in nuptiality over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the sample villages were fairly minor and thus cannot have had much impact, either on trends in overall fertility for the village populations as a whole, or on fertility differentials among the major occupational subgroups. No information on the proportions married, an aspect of nuptiality which could potentially change independently of the age at marriage, is available from the village genealogies.