This article discusses family patterns in the vast territories of historical Poland and Lithuania at the end of the eighteenth century. It explores one of the largest collections of historical household data in Europe on pre-industrial rural settings, and applies a variety of methodologies to reveal various aspects of family systems, as well as their spatial distribution. Three regional family patterns have been distinguished in the historical Polish territories, differing both in terms of household structure and household formation rules and in terms of their marriage patterns. Analysis of the dataset on these spatially, culturally and socioeconomically diverse regions has also facilitated the preliminary identification of the factors shaping these family systems. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the data presented here suggest that the impact of second serfdom on family structure was by no means uniform, and that factors other than purely economic ones may actually have accounted for the diversity of family systems prevailing in historical Poland and Lithuania.

This article illustrates various characteristics of the real-estate market in Lumezzane, a village in the Lombard Prealps between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. It reveals the types of property sold, the objectives of the buyers and sellers, the prices paid and, in some cases, the credit arrangements undertaken. The research indicates the relationship between the credit market and the type of manufacture in the region. Particular institutions, most notably religious foundations known as the Luoghi Pii, as well as private individuals, provided capital to artisans in the absence of banks. This availability of credit at favourable rates allowed artisans to produce manufactured goods at a competitive price even in difficult economic times. The importance of industry in the region both influenced strategies of inheritance and limited the need for the type of out-migration that characterized most Alpine regions during the period.

This article summarizes aspects of the decline in infant mortality in the five Nordic countries. During the nineteenth century, both the levels of infant mortality and its development differed among the Nordic countries. At an early date, Denmark, Norway and Sweden stood out as the countries with the lowest levels in Europe whereas levels of infant mortality in Iceland and Finland were comparatively high. Within the countries there were large regional differences that often crossed national borders. Artificial feeding characterized most of the areas with the highest infant mortality. Within the different countries the high infant mortality came to be seen as a problem during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The spread of information, midwives as agents of change and high literacy are factors that have been proven important in explaining the subsequent decline.

In the second half of the nineteenth century in the remote farming district of Dungog in the colony of New South Wales on the Australian continent, widows faced harsh economic realities. Using civil registration records, census data, newspaper reports, statistical returns, family histories and other sources, we have, where possible, reconstructed the lives of these widows, particularly those with dependent children. This paper discusses the range of survival strategies used. It presents statistical evidence from official records, and adds vignettes of the lives of a handful of widows whose strategies can be explored more completely using additional historical sources.

Typologies of marriage patterns in early modern Europe have been formulated by John Hajnal and Peter Laslett. However, demographic and anthropological studies have noticed that marriage patterns in the Balkan area have exhibited such great variability that it is difficult to classify them in any of the categories proposed by Laslett. This article examines the marriage patterns in Greece and some of her island populations in the time-span of the twentieth century. Although the marriage patterns examined do not conform to any pre-defined typology, it seems that up to the first half of the twentieth century the pattern of mainland Greece constituted an intermediate case between the West and the East European marriage patterns but that that on the islands was totally different. The marriage patterns on the Ionian Islands had more features in common with the West European pattern, while the marriage pattern of the Cyclades reveals certain characteristics (but not all) of the Mediterranean pattern.