This special issue highlights recent work in the history of families in Canada and the United States. With full-count census data series from the mid-nineteenth century newly available for both countries since the mid-2010s, this issue shows how scholars are taking advantage of new possibilities for research in North American family history. The articles in this issue return to several important questions in the history of families on the continent. How did families adapt to high rates of migration over long distances, with many people moving to destinations several weeks travel from their original homes? In early and late adulthood, what have been the changing patterns of living independently, or choosing to live with parents, adult children, or relatives outside the direct line of descent? The distinctive regional and cultural patterns of fertility change in North America are also discussed. Methodologically the issue demonstrates how historians of the family are using recently-released large census datasets in distinct ways. Some are taking advantage of the ability to create new variables or measures from microdata. Others focus on particular areas of the continent, and integrate large-scale data with other sources. Linkage to other record sources is also increasingly common.

In October 2001, IPUMS released a preliminary population database for all individuals recorded in the 1880 population census of the United States (Goeken et al. 2003). Containing 50 million person ...

In October 2001, IPUMS released a preliminary population database for all individuals recorded in the 1880 population census of the United States (Goeken et al. 2003). Containing 50 million person ...

IPUMS has finalized databases for each of the United States population censuses from 1850 to 1880. These data are the result of collaborations between FamilySearch and Ancestry.com, which provided the raw data, and IPUMS, which enhanced the data with editing, standardized coding, inter-census harmonization, and documentation. We discuss the data capture process conducted by the nineteenth-century United States Census Office, construction of the modern datasets, and variable availability. We conclude by briefly discussing the potential and limitations of these data for social science research. The public data are distributed by IPUMS and available for researchers to use free of charge.

The economic characteristics of one’s childhood neighborhood have been found to deter mine long-term well-being. Policies enacted dur ing child hood may change neighborhood trajectories and thus impact long-term outcomes for children. We use individual-level data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study to examine the enduring consequences of childhood exposure to local-area New Deal emergency employment work-relief activ ity. Our out comes include ado les cent cog ni tion, edu ca tional attain­ment, mid­life income, health behav­iors, late-life cog­ni­tion, and mor­tal­ity. We find that children (ages 0–3) living in neighborhoods with moderate work-relief activity in 1940 had higher adolescent IQ scores, had higher class rank, and were more likely to obtain at least a bach­e­lor’s degree. We find endur­ing ben­e­fits for mid­life income and late-life cognition for males who grew up in areas with a moderate amount of work relief. We find mixed results for males who grew up in the most dis­ad­van­taged areas with the highest levels of work-relief activity. These children had similar educational outcomes as those in the most advantaged districts with the lowest work-relief activity but had higher adult smok­ing rates. Our find­ings pro­vide some of the first evi­dence of the long-term consequences of New Deal policies on children’s long-term life course outcomes.

Research on the health consequences of criminal legal system contact has increasingly looked beyond imprisonment to understand how more routine forms of surveillance and punishment shape wellbeing. One of these sites is probation, the largest form of supervision in the U.S. Drawing on an interview study with 162 adults on probation in Hennepin County, MN, in 2019, we map how adults on probation understand the consequences of supervision for their health and how these self-reported health changes correlate with individual, social, and structural circumstances. Roughly half of participants described their health as having improved since starting probation, while the remainder were split between no change and worsened health. Examining both closed-ended survey questions and open-ended interview prompts, we find that the “gains” of supervision were correlated with substance use treatment (often mandated), reduced drug and alcohol use, increased housing and food security, and perceptions of support from their probation officer. However, these potentially health-promoting mechanisms were attenuated for many participants by the significant “pains” of supervision, including the threat of revocation, which sometimes impacted mental health. In addition, participants in the most precarious circumstances were often unable to meet the demands of supervision, resulting in further punishment. Moving beyond the “pains” and “gains” framework, we argue that this analysis provides empirical evidence for the importance of moving social services outside of punishing criminal legal system interventions. People with criminal legal contact often come from deeply marginalized socio-economic contexts and are then expected to meet the rigorous demands of supervision with little state aid for redressing structural barriers. Access to essential services, including healthcare, food, and housing, without the threat of further criminal legal sanctions, can better prevent and respond to many of the behaviors that are currently criminalized in the U.S. legal system, including substance use.

Obesity is an increasing public health concern with important mortality consequences. Weight gain or maximum adult BMI, not BMI at one point in time, has been shown to be an important risk factor in cohorts studied recently during an era of rapid increase in population levels of overweight and obesity. However, there is limited evidence on individual weight trajectories from cohorts born before the mid-twentieth century. Archival world war military personnel files from New Zealand are freely available online, and identify service in both wars. A pilot study of 316 soldiers confirmed the files contain sufficient information to examine health trajectories and lifespan. Because this cohort are now entirely deceased, nearly the entire sample can be found in death records to estimate the impact of weight increases on lifespan. Weight change over 20–30 years and its relationship with lifespan is examined using ordinary least squares regression. The study demonstrates that military records are a feasible source for collecting data on adult weight and health trajectories in the first half of the twentieth century. Although this sample is likely to be composed of men fitter than average, there is a clear pattern of increasing weight from early to mid-adulthood. Weight gain from early adulthood to middle-age was found to be more strongly associated with mortality than weight in early adulthood. A one unit increase in BMI over the inter-war period was found to be associated with an 8 month decline in lifespan. These results confirm that weight gain in adulthood has an important impact on mortality in an earlier birth cohort than previously studied, and that data exist to measure any changes more precisely over time.

Childhood malnutrition and its later life effects were important concerns in European and North American social policy in the early twentieth century. However, there have been few studies of the lo...

This paper examines the work and work culture of department store salespeople in New Zealand department stores. Following the management advice of American, British, and Australian experts New Zeal...

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) makes publicly and freely available period migration data at the state and county levels. Among their uses, these data inform estimates of net-migration as part of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Program, which, in turn, are used for producing other annual statistics, survey design, business and community planning, and federal funding allocations. Building on and extending prior research, we devote this Research Brief to documenting from multiple new angles a highly concerning and apparently systemic problem with the IRS migration data since the IRS took over responsibilities for preparing these data from the U.S. Census Bureau in 2011. As we then discuss, despite the fact that the IRS provides documentation detailing changes that it made to how it prepares these data relative to how the U.S. Census Bureau prepared them, it is not clear why or how these changes would result in the problem detailed in our analysis. Given that this problem appears to be an internal one within the IRS, we conclude by suggesting that the post 2011–2012 IRS migration data not be used until this problem is resolved, and we encourage the IRS to do so quickly, transparently, and collaboratively.

Children require a large amount of time, effort, and resources to raise. Physical help, financial contributions, medical care, and other types of assistance from kin and social network members allow couples to space births closer together while maintaining or increasing child survival. We examine the impact of kin availability on couples’ reproductive success in the early twentieth-century United States with a panel data set of over 3.1 million couples linked between the 1900 and 1910 U.S. censuses. Our results indicate that kin proximity outside the household was positively associated with fertility, child survival, and net reproduction, and suggest that declining kin availability was an important contributing factor to the fertility transition in the United States. We also find important differences between maternal and paternal kin inside the household—including higher fertility among women residing with their mother-in-law than among those residing with their mother—that support hypotheses related to the contrasting motivations and concerns of parents and parents-in-law.

Introduction: Understanding which non-cigarette tobacco products precede smoking in youth across different racial/ethnic groups can inform policies that consider tobacco-related health disparities. Methods: We used nationally representative, longitudinal data from the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health Study waves 1-4. The sample was a dynamic cohort of cigarette-naïve youth aged 12-17 years. Mixed-effects models were used to assess non-cigarette product (e-cigarette, cigar product, or other product) use with cigarette use over 1-year intervals. Results: Of the 28 788 observations pooled across waves 1-4, respondents were 48.7% non-Hispanic white, 13.9% non-Hispanic black, and 23.1% Hispanic. Odds of cigarette initiation over 1-year follow-up were higher among youth with prior use of e-cigarettes (odds ratio [OR], 2.76; 95% confidence interval [CI], 2.21-3.45), cigars (OR, 2.00; 95% CI, 1.42-2.80), or other products (OR, 1.66; 95% CI, 1.28-2.14) compared to never users. At the population level, 20.6% of cigarette initiation was attributable to e-cigarette use among white youth and 21.6% among Hispanic youth, while only 3.5% of cigarette initiation was attributable to e-cigarette use among black youth. In contrast, 9.1% of cigarette initiation for black youth was attributable to cigar use compared to only 3.9% for both white and Hispanic youth. Conclusions: Prior use of e-cigarettes, cigars, and other non-cigarette products were all associated with subsequent cigarette initiation. However, white and Hispanic youth were more likely to initiate cigarettes through e-cigarette use (vs. cigar or other product use), while black youth were more likely to initiate cigarettes through cigar use (vs. e-cigarette or other product use). Implications: Our findings suggest that previous studies on effects of non-cigarette tobacco products may overlook the critical role of cigar products as a pathway into cigarette smoking among US youth, particularly black youth. While our data support the importance of e-cigarette use as a pathway into smoking, regulatory actions aimed at addressing youth e-cigarette use alone may contribute to disparities in black versus white tobacco use and further exacerbate inequities in tobacco-related disease. Thus, contemporary policy development and discourse about the effects of non-cigarette tobacco products on cigarette initiation should consider cigar and other non-cigarette products as well as e-cigarettes.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Learning to balance the clinical, educa-tional, and scholarly elements of an academic career is challenging for faculty. To increase research output amongst family medicine faculty with limited to no publications, we developed the Collaborative Scholarship Intensive (CSI) to provide participants with intensive instruction in research methodology coupled with structured writing support and protected time for writing. METHODS: The CSI was developed by the University of Minnesota Department of Family Medicine and Community Health as a six-session faculty development program that enrolled 23 participants in its first three classes. RESULTS: Findings reveal that faculty participants significantly improved their pre-to postcourse self-ratings of 12 research competencies, and significantly increased their scholarly output. CONCLUSIONS: Our CSI faculty development program successfully engaged clinical faculty in a collaborative research program. Our results suggest that a program focused on intensive instruction in research methodology coupled with structured writing support and protected writing time may be a model for faculty development in other academic departments.

Does education change people’s lives in a way that delays mortality? Or is education primarily a proxy for unobserved endowments that promote longevity? Most scholars conclude that the former is true, but recent evidence based on Danish twin data calls this conclusion into question. Unfortunately, these potentially field-changing findings—that obtaining additional schooling has no independent effect on survival net of other hard-to-observe characteristics—have not yet been subject to replication outside Scandinavia. In this article, we produce the first U.S.-based estimates of the effects of education on mortality using a representative panel of male twin pairs drawn from linked complete-count census and death records. For comparison purposes, and to shed additional light on the roles that neighborhood, family, and genetic factors play in confounding associations between education and mortality, we also produce parallel estimates of the education-mortality relationship using data on (1) unrelated males who lived in different neighborhoods during childhood, (2) unrelated males who shared the same neighborhood growing up, and (3) non-twin siblings who shared the same family environment but whose genetic endowments vary to a greater degree. We find robust associations between education and mortality across all four samples, although estimates are modestly attenuated among twins and non-twin siblings. These findings—coupled with several robustness checks and sensitivity analyses—support a causal interpretation of the association between education and mortality for cohorts of boys born in the United States in the first part of the twentieth century.

Indigenous people have experienced relatively high incarceration rates in British Columbia, as elsewhere in North America, since the 1940s. Archival prison records, however, show that the incidence of Indigenous incarceration was lower than for other people before 1910. This evidence implies the crucial period for increasing incarceration of Indigenous peoples in British Columbias was from 1910 to 1940. The pattern for Indigenous women differed from that of men. Large numbers of Indigenous women were imprisoned in the 1870s and 1880s. The British Columbia Indigenous pattern has important similarities to the New Zealand Māori in the same era. Neither Indigenous experience is easily explained by group threat theory used to understand rising incarceration for African-Americans in this period. Indigenous incarceration in settler states prior to the 1950s needs additional comparative research and theoretical understanding.

This paper presents a new probabilistic method of record linkage, developed using the U.S. full count censuses of 1900 and 1910 but applicable to a range of different sources of historical records. The method was designed to exploit a more comprehensive set of individual and contextual characteristics present in historical census data, aiming to obtain a machine learning algorithm that better distinguishes between multiple potential matches. Our results demonstrate that the method achieves a match rate that is twice as high other currently popular methods in the literature while at the same time also achieving greater accuracy. In addition, the method only performs negligibly worse than other algorithms in resembling the target population.

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) makes publicly and freely available annual place-based and place-to-place migration data at the state and county levels. Among their many uses, the IRS migration data inform estimates of net-migration as part of the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Estimates Program, which, in turn, are used for producing other annual statistics, survey design, business planning, community development programs, and federal funding allocations. In this Research Note, we document what appears to be a systemic problem with the IRS migration data since the IRS took over responsibilities for preparing these data from the U.S. Census Bureau in 2011. We conclude by speculating on possible reasons for this problem and suggesting that the post-2011 IRS migration data not be used until the IRS resolves this issue.

In the wake of the 1994 genocide, Rwanda’s government created the Gacaca courts to hold suspected perpetrators accountable. Although much has been written about these courts, researchers know comparatively less about the 250,000 individuals who served as Gacaca court judges (inyangamugayo). We draw upon 135 interviews to explore how the inyangamugayo entered and adapted to their new public roles as moral arbiters, how these judges understood Gacaca’s missions, and how their social identities evolved over the course of multiple status transitions. Building on Erving Goffman’s sequential approach to moral careers, we trace the process of becoming a judge. In doing so, we highlight the two overarching missions that surfaced during the interviews – justice and reconciliation – and how the judges continued to view themselves as inyangamugayo even after the courts closed.