1 A. J. Coale and S. C. Watkins eds., The decline of fertility in Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1986); J.-C. Chesnais (trans. E. Kreager and P. Kreager), The demographic transition: stages, patterns, and economic implications (Oxford, 1992).

2 G. Caselli, Long-term trends in European mortality, Office of Population Censuses and Surveys Studies on Medical and Population Subjects, 56 (London, 1994); J. Charlton and M. Murphy, ‘The health of adult Britain, 1841–1994’, Decennial Supplement nos. 12 and 13 (2 vols.; London, 1997); Vaupel, J. W., ‘The remarkable improvements in survival at older ages’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 352 (1363) (1997), 1799–1804CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Coale and Watkins, Decline of fertility.

4 The group born in the period 1945–1964 is often but incorrectly referred to as ‘baby-boomers’, which is taken from US fertility patterns. In fact in Britain, there were more births in the quinquennium 1971–1975 than in central period of the nominal ‘baby boom’ period.

5 van de Kaa, D. J., ‘Europe's Second Demographic Transition’, Population Bulletin 42, 1 (1987)Google ScholarPubMed: R. Lesthaeghe, ‘The Second Demographic Transition in Western countries: an interpretation’, in K. O. Mason and A.-M. Jensen eds., Gender and family change in developed societies (Oxford, 1995), 17–62.

6 For example, D. Coleman, ‘Population prospects and problems in Europe’, in the special issue of Genus, ‘Trends and problems of the world population in the XXI century’, LXI, 3–4 (2005), 413–66.

7 Murphy, M., ‘The contraceptive pill and women's employment as factors in fertility change in Britain 1963–1980: a challenge to the conventional view’, Population Studies 47, 2 (1993), 221–43CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

8 T. Sobotka, ‘The diverse faces of the second demographic transition in Europe’, in T. Frejka, T. Sobotka, J. M. Hoem and L. Toulemon eds., Childbearing trends and policies in Europe, special collection of Demographic Research 19 (2008). Data Eurostat Fertility Indicators are available at http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page?_pageid=0,1136184,0_45572595&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL (accessed 14 February 2008).

9 INED (2008), INED database available at http://www.ined.fr/en/pop_figures/developed_countries/situation/one_indicator/. Eurostat fertility indicators are available at http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page?_pageid=0,1136184,0_45572595&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL (accessed 14 February 2008).

10 Coleman, ‘Prospects’, 2005; Murphy, M., ‘Variations in kinship networks across geographic and social space’, Population and Development Review 34, 1 (2008), 19–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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14 General Register Office, Census of England and Wales 1911: Volume XIII: Fertility of marriage, part I: tables (London, 1917); General Register Office, Census 1951, England and Wales Fertility Report (London, 1959); General Register Office, Census 1961, England and Wales: fertility tables (London, 1966); Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, Fertility report of the 1971 Census: the Registrar General's Decennial Supplement for England and Wales 1971, Series DS 5 (London, 1983); D. V. Glass and E. Grebenik, The trend and pattern of fertility in Great Britain: a report on the family census of 1946: Volume VI: Papers of the Royal Commission on Population, part I: report, and part II: tables (London, 1954); Registrar General, Registrar General's statistical review of England and Wales for the years 1938 and 1939, part II: civil tables (London, 1944).

15 J. E. Smith, ‘Simulation of kin sets and kin counts’, in J. Bongaarts, T. Burch and K. Wachter eds., Family demography: methods and their application (Oxford, 1987), 249–66; D. A. Wolf, ‘The elderly and their kin: patterns of availability and access’, in L. G. Martin and S. H. Preston eds., Demography of aging (Washington DC, 1994), 146–94; Zhao, Z. W., ‘The demographic transition in Victorian England and changes in English kinship networks’, Continuity and Change 11, 2 (1996), 243–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; E. van Imhoff and W. Post, ‘Micro-simulation methods for population projection’, Population: an English selection, special issue: New Methodological Approaches in the Social Sciences (1998), 97–138.

16 E. A. Hammel, ‘Demographic dynamics and kinship in anthropological populations’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 102 (2005), 2248–53; E. A. Hammel, C. Mason and K. W. Wachter, SOCSIM II, a sociodemographic micro-simulation program, rev. 1.0, operating manual: University of California, Institute of International Studies, Program in Population Research Graduate Group in Demography working paper, 29 (Berkeley, CA, 1990); K. W. Wachter, ‘Kinship resources for the elderly’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences 352(1363) (1997), 1811–17.

17 R. Wall, ‘Elderly persons and members of their households in England and Wales from preindustrial times to the present’, in D. I. Kertzer and P. Laslett eds., Aging in the past: demography, society and old age (Berkeley CA, 1995), 81–106; R. Wall, ‘Historical development of the household in Europe’, in E. van Imhoff, A. Kuijsten, P. Hooimeijer and L. van Wissen eds., Household demography and household modeling (New York, 1995), 19–52.

18 E. Grundy and M. Murphy, ‘Kin availability, contact and support exchanges between adult children and their parents in Great Britain’, in F. Ebtehaj, B. Lindley and M. Richards eds., Kinship matters (Oxford, 2006), 195–215.

19 E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The population history of England, 1541–1871: a reconstruction (Cambridge, 1981).

20 Murphy, ‘Evolution of cohabitation’.

21 A closed model is one where marriage partners have to be found from within the non-married simulated population rather than being created when required, in the case of open models. K. W. Wachter, ‘Micro-simulation of household cycles’, in Bongaarts, Burch and Wachter eds., Family demography, 215–27.

22 Note that this is not possible where a woman gives birth without an identified partner (in this analysis, any birth outside of a cohabiting or marital union), since such fathers are regarded as unknown. Thus the data for certain types of kin presented here, such as the proportion with surviving parents and grandparents, are based on the sub-group of people all of whose relevant relatives are known, although alternative calculations including children with missing fathers (and grandfathers in the case of grandparental estimates) have also been made. Such births outside of a partnership in this model account for about 5 per cent of births until around 1950, but the figure had increased to about 10 per cent by 2000.

23 M. Murphy, ‘Bringing behaviour back into micro-simulation: feedback mechanisms in demographic models’, in F. Billari and A. Prskawetz eds., Agent-based computational demography: using simulation to improve our understanding of demographic behaviour (Heidelberg, 2003), 159–74.

24 Murphy, M., ‘Demographic and socio–economic influences on recent British marital breakdown patterns’, Population Studies 39, 3 (1985), 441–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, 1991 census: historical tables, Great Britain, (London: 1993), Table 6: Census unpublished tabulation M538, sex and age by partnership and limiting long-term illness, England & Wales, are available via http://www.ons.gov.uk/about/who-we-are/our-services/unpublished-data/census-data/census-commissioned-tables#top.

26 Details are available at http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/findingData/snDescription.asp?sn=4222). See also Grundy, E., Murphy, M. and Shelton, N., ‘Looking beyond the household: inter-generational perspectives on living kin and contacts with kin in Great Britain’, Population Trends 97 (1999), 19–27Google Scholar.

27 The same holds potentially for the future as well; see M. Murphy, ‘Family and kinship networks in the context of ageing societies’, in S. Tuljapurkar, N. Ogawa and A. Gauthier eds., Responses to aging in advanced industrial states: riding the age waves, Volume 3 (New York, 2010; forthcoming).

28 The RMS difference is the square root of the mean of the squared difference of the fitted and actual values in each age group. It therefore indicates the typical level of error of the fitted values, which will be in percentage terms for data such as Table 3 and number of kin in Table 4. In the case of data for 1900, the average proportion of people with a partner is about 40 per cent and the average error is only about 0.5 per cent, indicating a close fit between the actual and fitted values. The magnitude of these values may be compared with the actual values. Note that in this case, unlike with the marital status data, the actual values are estimates obtained from survey data and are therefore subject to random sampling error; this will mean that the fitted values will be compared with estimates that are themselves subject to error, so the differences between the fitted and true values will probably be less than with these estimates, so the values of the RMS difference understate the precision of these results.

29 This is simply the equivalent of taking censuses of the same population at different points in time and producing summary measures of kinship networks at these points.

30 J. Hajnal, ‘European marriage patterns in perspective’, in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley eds., Population in history: essays in historical demography (London, 1965), 101–43; Hajnal, J., ‘Two kinds of preindustrial household formation system’, Population and Development Review 8, 3 (1982), 449–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Coale and Watkins, Decline of fertility; see also D. Coleman, ‘New patterns and trends in European fertility: international and sub-national comparisons’, in D. Coleman ed. Europe's population in the 1990s (Oxford, 1996), 1–61.

32 The total first marriage rate (TFMR) is the sum of first marriage rates for single persons per age group observed in a given year (usually confined to ages 15–49) and may be interpreted as the probability that an individual will eventually marry if these rates hold. Note that the value can exceed one in years of rapid increase in the number of marriages and can fall to low levels if marriages are declining.

33 Berrington, A. and Murphy, M., ‘Changes in the living arrangements of young people in Britain during the 1980s’, European Sociological Review 10, 3 (1994), 235–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Hajnal, ‘European marriage patterns’.

35 Kalogirou, S. and Murphy, M., ‘Marital status of people aged 75 and over in nine EU countries in the period 2000–2030’, European Journal of Ageing 3, 2 (2006), 74–81CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

36 Murphy, ‘Evolution of cohabitation’.

37 Grundy and Murphy, ‘Kin availability’.

38 EUROFAMCARE Consortium eds., The trans-European survey report (February 2006), available at http://www.uke.uni-hamburg.de/extern/eurofamcare/documents/deliverables/teusure_web_060906.pdf, Table 59.

39 Murphy, M., Martikainen, P. and Pennec, S., ‘Demographic change and the supply of potential family supporters in Britain, Finland and France in the period 1911–2050’, European Journal of Population 22, 3 (2006), 19–40Google Scholar.

40 At the age at which 50 per cent of people have at least one parent alive, the average number of parents will be greater or equal to 0.5 (since all those with a parent alive have at least one parent) but less than or equal to 1.0 (since not all of these will have both parents alive), therefore the average will lie between 0.5 and 1.0.

41 Murphy, Martikainen and Pennec, ‘Demographic change’.

42 More detailed estimates are given by D. T. Rowland, ‘Historical trends in childlessness’, Journal of Family Issues 28, 10 (2007), 1311–37.

43 R. Woods, The demography of Victorian England and Wales (Cambridge: 2000).

44 Ibid.; Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, Birth statistics: historical series of statistics from registrations of births in England and Wales, 1837–1983, Series FM1 no. 13 (London, 1983).

45 S. H. Preston, ‘Family sizes of children and family sizes of women’, Demography 13, 1 (1976), 105–14; C. M. Langford, ‘Family size from the child's point of view’, Journal of Biosocial Science 14 (1982), 319–27; M. Anderson, ‘Highly restricted fertility: very small families in the British fertility decline’, Population Studies 52, 2 (1998), 177–99.

46 Murphy, ‘Bringing behaviour back’; Registrar General, 1911 Census of England and Wales, Vol. XIII: Fertility of marriages, part II (London, 1923).

47 A similar point – that having a sibling will remain very common in the context of the much lower fertility regime of Italy – was made by Tomassini, C. and Wolf, D. A., in ‘Shrinking kin networks in Italy due to sustained low fertility’, European Journal of Population 16 (2001), 353–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Anderson, ‘Highly restricted fertility’.

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52 These figures are similar to those found by Haskey, in his ‘Stepfamilies’; see also M. Murphy, ‘Chapter 4: Family living arrangements and health’, in S. Smallwood and B. Wilson eds., Focus on families (Basingstoke, 2007), 56–69.

53 This article is not concerned with co-residence, so ‘family’ refers to a kin group rather than to the statistically convenient but socially incomplete definition of a family as a co-resident nuclear unit. A situation where a couple splits up leaving the children with the mother, and she forms a new partnership, is different from one where the father does so, since the child is likely to be in a very different relationship with the new partner in these two cases.

54 M. Anderson, ‘What's new about the modern family?’, in The family: proceedings of the British Society for Population Studies Conference, 1983, Office of Population Censuses and Surveys occasional paper no. 31 (London, 1983), 1–16.

55 Wachter, ‘Kinship resources’, 1997.

56 F. Fukuyama, Trust: the social virtues and the creation of prosperity (New York, 1995); R. D. Putnam, Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community (New York, 2000).

57 J. Finch, Family obligations and social change (Cambridge, 1989).

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