Local Population Studies in Central Europe: A Review of Historical Demography and Social History

by Volkmar Weiss

The method of putting together the persons extracted from a parish-register with the family to which they belong, the family reconstitution or Henry Method, was published in the nineteen fifties in France and has undoubtedly influenced the historical demography and the social history of the world. But the international science failed to notice that in the German-speaking countries such products had appeared several decades before and in large numbers. Already in the 16th Century in some villages there existed a soul register, which were a temporal cross-section of the population in a fixed year. In 1807 family registers were prescribed by law for every village of Württemberg. During the period of National Socialism the Reichsnährstand had the ambition to publish a Village Clan Book for each village. Since the nineteen fifties, local family kinship books were published by genealogists in a permanently growing number. The main part of this monograph contains a review of questions and methods on the scientific evaluation of local family kinship books, along with an exhausting bibliography. The topics The pioneers; the anthropologist Walter Scheidt and his school; Medical problems and endogamy; The Innsbruck school; The habits of inheritance; Ecological village studies; Social differences of the number of children; Migration and urbanization; Age at marriage; The French school; Social mobility; Household structures; Family sociology; Microhistory; Confessional differences; Sociobiology; Preparations for representative studies on the basis of 2,000 already-existing local family kinship books of German-speaking countries.

Paperback

Published June 14, 2020

About the author

German scientist, psychohistorian and writer, primarily interested in the field of IQ research.

He is mostly known for his controversial thesis that biological intelligence is fixed to social class and for co-founding the German Social Union.

He also published an alternative history novel about a succesor reich of Nazi-Germany.