This article uses the evidence of midwifery deliveries to investigate the strengths and shortcomings of parish registers, and to pose questions about infant and maternal mortality. It focuses on the delivery notebooks of Thomas Higgins, a man-midwife of north Shropshire, but also employs comparators from Staffordshire and Yorkshire. The research incorporates a technique for dealing with infants where neither a baptism nor a burial can be found. The findings include rare evidence about rates of stillbirth and maternal mortality, and suggest some adjustments to the assumptions made for conducting parish reconstitutions.

The consideration of the removals aspect of settlement law – that is, the moving on of paupers or potential paupers to the parish where they ‘belonged’ – has focused almost exclusively on working-age adults and labour migration. This article focuses on how removal law affected families with children in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in two large London parishes. It finds that children were a sizeable presence among the removed population but that there were notable differences in family type between the two parishes. Furthermore, while most young children were kept with their mothers even if they did not share a settlement, others were removed alone, even after a change in settlement law in 1795 that should have assured their common claim in certain cases. The study sheds light on attitudes to poor children and their families, as well as on the exigencies brought about by economic circumstances and employment opportunities in the parish.

This article is a study of single mothers in Lyon in the nineteenth century, including what happened to them after they gave birth to an illegitimate child. Unmarried mothers have been the subject of much previous research on different countries but such studies often begin with the last days of the pregnancy and stop a few days after the delivery. Our aim is to look at the life course of single mothers before pregnancy and after delivery. In Lyon, at the time the second French city in terms of population, we studied 2,000 unwed mothers, some of them multiparous, noting their extensive geographical mobility and the frequency of their moves within the city.

In this article, we study variations in co-residence with kin in the Netherlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We use the reconstructed life courses of 17,527 individuals derived from the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) database. The life-course approach allows us to look at co-residence from the perspectives of both the receiving households and the co-resident kin. What made households take in relatives and do we find a preference for one type of relative over another? What was the background of people who decided to co-reside in another household? How important were family-related ‘altruistic’ motives compared with economic ones? The outcomes suggest the predominance of altruistic motives for co-residence, apart from persistent inheritance customs in the eastern part of the country.

This article examines the interplay of the Secularization of 1803, the ‘professionalisation’ of pharmacy, and increasing state control in Württemberg after 1806 by looking at convent pharmacies and their destiny after the secularization of the convents in 1803. This interplay consequently led to the temporary abolition of convent pharmacies and with them an important occupational niche for female apothecaries was thus lost. The research is based on a detailed case study of the convent pharmacy in Gutenzell in Upper Swabia, 50 kilometres south of Ulm.