Reconstructing Birth Histories using Linked Household Data and the 1911 Census Fertility Survey

Abstract

Complete birth histories which allow analysis of mother’s age at birth and birth intervals by parity are rare in historical data. Partial birth histories can be obtained from retrospective fertility surveys and census data which record the numbers of children ever born, children deceased, and the ages of surviving coresident children. Luther and Cho (1988) proposed a method for reconstructing complete birth histories by imputing ages for deceased and non-coresident children, and Hacker (2020) extended this method to historical census data with adjusted, group-specific inputs. This paper adapts the reconstruction method to a sample of the 1911 census of England and Wales and describes the contribution of record linking between censuses from 1881 onwards to reduce the number of missing observations in the partial birth histories. Record linking particularly addresses concerns about uncertainty in estimating age-specific fertility for women whose children were born more than fifteen years before the survey date.