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2 This is not to say that household processes were unimportant, but rather that they did not loom as large in children's everyday experiences as they did in those of adults – and of the social theorists who have tended to focus on adult concerns. Most of the scholarship on extended families in historic Europe has followed Laslett's classic discussion by asking how extended families and communities may, or may not, have supported households. See Laslett, Peter, ‘Family, kinship and collectivity as systems of support in pre-industrial Europe: a consideration of the “nuclear-hardship” hypothesis’, Continuity and Change 3, 2 (1988), 153–75Google Scholar. See also Kertzer, David L., Hogan, Dennis P. and Karweit, Nancy, ‘Kinship beyond the household in a nineteenth-century Italian town’, Continuity and Change 7, 1 (1992), 103–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Neven, Muriel, ‘The influence of the wider kin group on individual life course transitions: results from the Pays de Herve (Belgium) 1846–1900’, Continuity and Change 17, 3 (2002), 405–35Google Scholar; Plakans, Andrejs and Wetherell, Charles, ‘Households and kinship networks: the costs and benefits of contextualization’, Continuity and Change 18, 1 (2003), 49–76Google Scholar; Wall, Richard, ‘Economic collaboration of family members within and beyond households in English society, 1600–2000’, Continuity and Change 25, 1 (2010), 83–108Google Scholar.

3 Arensberg, Conrad M. and Kimball, Solon T., Family and community in Ireland, 3rd edn (Ennis, County Clare, Ireland, 2001)Google Scholar. The first edition appeared in 1940. For a comprehensive overview of the significance of the study, see the introduction to the third edition: Anne Byrne, Ricca Edmondson and Tony Varley, ‘Introduction to the Third Edition’, in Arensberg and Kimball, Family and Community in Ireland, i–cl. See also Seward, Rudy R., Stivers, Richard A., Igoe, Donal G., Amin, Iftekhar and Cosimo, Deborah, ‘Irish families in the twentieth century: exceptional or converging?’, Journal of Family History 30, 4 (2005), 410–30Google Scholar; and Guinnane, Timothy W., The vanishing Irish: households, migration and the rural economy in Ireland (Princeton, 1997), 29–31Google Scholar.

4 Guinnane, The vanishing Irish, 79–132; Gráda, Cormac Ó, A rocky road: the Irish economy since the 1920s (Manchester, 1997), 192Google Scholar.

5 Hannan, Damien. F. and Commins, Patrick, ‘The significance of small-scale landholders in Ireland's socio-economic transformation’, in Goldthorpe, J. H. and Whelan, C. T. eds., The development of industrial society in Ireland (Oxford, 1992), 79–104Google Scholar, here 81.

6 In his authoritative study Guinnane identified some differences between the Irish scholarship on rural household systems and the wider European literature. In Ireland, inheritance practices have been inferred from ethnographic and folkloric evidence, and have been understood as outcomes of social and economic conditions, rather than legal systems. In some accounts marriage of the heir did not occur until the death of his father, in which case multiple-family households would not have occurred. Guinnane argues that the evidence shows considerable flexibility and intrafamily bargaining surrounding the timing of succession. See Guinnane, The vanishing Irish, pp. 133–65.

7 Hannan, Damien F., Displacement and development: class, kinship and social change in Irish rural communities (Dublin, 1979), 69Google Scholar. This article follows both Arensberg and Kimball, and Hannan, in its focus on the kinship groups (or kindreds) mobilised in everyday interactions and relationships. Kinship groups were, of course, related to the system of descent that governed people's understandings of who they were related to. For a detailed discussion see Hannan, Displacement and development, pp. 79–85. With respect to communities, as Arensberg and Kimball observed, their boundaries varied according to the kinds of social interaction in question. Everyday relations of solidarity and exchange occurred within townlands. See Arensberg and Kimball, Family and community in Ireland, 273–4. Hannan argued that neighbouring took place within ‘station areas’, sub-units of parishes that usually covered one or a small number of townlands. See Hannan, Displacement and development, 85. The local primary school was clearly the focal point for many of the childhood memories of community examined in this article. The parish was the basic administrative unit for primary schools, but there could be more than one school per parish. See Coolahan, John, Irish education: its history and structure (Dublin, 1981), 8Google Scholar.

8 Hannan, Displacement and development, 86.

9 Hannan, Displacement and development, 139–57. See also Smyth, William J., ‘Nephews, dowries, sons and mothers: the geography of farm and marital transactions in Eastern Ireland, c. 1820–c. 1970’, in Siddle, D. ed. Migration, mobility and modernization (Liverpool, 2000)Google Scholar.

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13 Hannan, Displacement and development, 59.

14 See Brody, Hugh, Inishkillane: change and decline in the west of Ireland (London, 1973)Google Scholar and Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, Saints, scholars and schizophrenics (Berkeley, 1979)Google Scholar.

15 Guinnane, Timothy W., ‘Re-thinking the western European marriage pattern: the decision to marry in Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century’, Journal of Family History 16, 1 (1991), 47–64Google Scholar, here 61.

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17 A welcome special issue on Ireland in the journal The History of the Family 13, 4 (2008) included surprisingly little discussion of the scholarship on historical household systems, with the exception of Cousins, Mel, ‘Poor relief and families in nineteenth-century Ireland and Italy’, The History of the Family 13, 4 (2008), 340–9.Google Scholar

18 See www.iqda.ie (accessed 22 October 2013). All transcripts in the archived dataset were anonymised to preserve respondent confidentiality. The personal names used throughout this article are, therefore, pseudonyms.

19 J. Gray and S. Ó Riain, Life Histories and Social Change Project [collection]. Maynooth, Co. Kildare: Irish Qualitative Data Archive [producer], ID10028. Irish Qualitative Data Archive [distributor]. The ‘Living in Ireland’ data are available from the Irish Social Science Data Archive: http://www.ucd.ie/issda/data/livinginirelandlii/

20 This is the ISCO88 (International Standard Classification of Occupations) Code 6, which includes farmers, available at http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/stat/isco/isco88/6.htm (accessed 9 June 2014).

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26 Hannan and Commins, ‘Significance of small-scale landholders’, 94–5; Hannan, Displacement and development, 56–9.

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32 Humphries, Childhood and child labour, 24.

33 Thirteen respondents provided descriptions of the journey to school in their narratives, while a further six described regular patterns of visiting with relatives in separate, non-family households. Eight respondents described instances of the residential circulation discussed in section 5; a further three referred to shorter-term residential circulation, during summer holidays, for example. The analysis is based on an in-depth reading of all the narratives included in the sample. Just two cases provided limited relevant material. In one case the respondent was exceptionally frail and the interview correspondingly thin. In the second case the respondent was from an exceptionally wealthy, elite family and the life experiences were therefore very different from those of other respondents in the study.

34 Alice Taylor, To school through the fields: an Irish country childhood (Dublin, 1988), available at http://www.obrien.ie/to-school-through-the-fields (accessed 7 October 2013).

35 Ferriter, ‘Suffer little children’, 89–90.

36 Arensberg and Kimball, Family and community in Ireland, 174, 184–6.

37 See Hajnal, John, ‘Household formation patterns in historical perspective’, Population and Development Review 8, 3 (1982), 449–94Google Scholar; Fauve-Chamoux, Antoinette and Wall, Richard, ‘Domestic servants in comparative perspective’, History of the Family 10, 4 (2005), 345–54Google Scholar.

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41 Breen, ‘Farm servanthood’.

42 This pattern is consistent evidence that, in the Netherlands, altruistic motives seem to have governed the decision to take in kin, at least from the perspective of receiving family households. Kok, Jan and Mandemakers, Kees, ‘A life-course approach to co-residence in the Netherlands, 1850–1940’, Continuity and Change 25, 2 (2010), 285–312Google Scholar, 304–7.

43 See Gray, Jane, Geraghty, Ruth and Ralph, David, ‘Young children and their grandparents: a secondary analysis across four birth cohorts’, Families, Relationships and Societies 2, 2 (2013), 289–98Google Scholar.

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