Practice question · Multiple choice
Parish registers were kept for religious reasons with no demographic intent. Why can that make them better evidence for population history than a contemporary census?
Hints
- Ask who the record was originally made FOR.
- Which bias is more dangerous: a large one, or one pointing the same way as your question?
Show the answer
B. Because a record kept for another purpose is not shaped by it
Why
Incidental evidence carries less of the collector’s agenda. It brings its own distortions — baptism lags birth, the unbaptised vanish — but they are not aligned with the historian’s hypothesis.
Practise Demographic and Statistical History
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Demographic and Statistical History
- What did family reconstitution reveal about north-west European demography?
- Put the steps of family reconstitution in order.
- Family reconstitution links baptisms, marriages and burials into individual life histories. Which group does…
- Household multipliers for medieval hearth taxes are usually estimated between 4.0 and 5.5. Using 5.5, what…
- Sort each measurement: recorded directly by parish registers, or recovered only by reconstitution?
- Pre-modern tax rolls can be read as approximate censuses of the population.