This paper introduces a new source for the study of mortality and the health transition in Italy: the Burial Permits. In the years leading up to the Italian Unification, local authorities began requiring official documentation, compiled by medical officers, for the burial of individuals in local cemeteries. These documents, preserved in the form of single sheets or registers, contain a wealth of individual-level data on deceased people, including the indication of the cause(s) of death. This feature, a novelty in the Italian historical demographic research, allows addressing a longstanding gap in the availability of individual-level information on causes of death, a factor that has limited and hampered the research on the evolution of the mortality patterns and the health transition in Italy. The paper provides a detailed description of this source and the type of information it contains, reviews what has been done so far, and investigates its possible applications to address new directions in the study of health and mortality in Italy.

This article reassesses the presence and agency of Portuguese women in Tenerife during the Iberian Union (1580–1640) through a prosopographic reading of notarial, inquisitorial and ecclesiastical documentation. Drawing on life‑course approaches, the study examines the legal and documentary moments through which Portuguese women became visible, situating their agency within the transitions that structured early modern family and mobility trajectories. Rather than attempting to reconstruct the Portuguese population as a whole, the study focuses on a small but analytically rich set of women whose actions — recorded in powers of attorney, wills, debt claims and trans‑archipelagic property transactions — make it possible to observe gendered strategies of mobility, representation and patrimonial management. By integrating a life‑course perspective with insights from Atlantic history and nesology, the analysis identifies three recurrent patterns: the central role of women in the transmission of property across islands; the heightened legal visibility associated with widowhood and the absence of male proxies; and the participation of certain households, particularly those linked to the Azores, in macro‑Atlantic circuits of craft, labour and migration. Comparisons by origin (Madeira, the Azores, continental Portugal) and civil status further clarify how women adapted a shared repertoire of strategies to different legal and familial contexts. The findings show that Portuguese women were not marginal actors but key architects of archipelagic continuity, transforming the constraints of insular life into forms of resilience that shaped kinship, identity and mobility across the early modern Atlantic.

Evolutionary biology predicts that when confronted with conditions of high mortality humans, like other species, will respond to these circumstances with a fast life history strategy with early sexual maturation, riskier courtship and earlier reproduction. Such responses in the form of an earlier start of menarche for women and lower ages at first sex and birth have already been found in contemporary populations, but there is far fewer research on historical populations, particularly for men. In this study we examine whether high mortality in the sibset leads to earlier marriage by performing an event history analysis on the historical population of Antwerp in the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. We find that this does indeed significantly speed up the transition to marriage (which is very closely linked to the start of reproduction, particularly in this historical population). By stratifying on family membership, we demonstrate that the mechanism works at the familial level and that individual experiences with sibling mortality have an opposite effect.

Between 1812 and 1931, Amsterdam experienced profound demographic, social, and epidemiological changes that reshaped how, when, and why people died. By tracing seasonal mortality patterns over this time period, trends in the rhythm of death are explored in our study. Using monthly death counts from municipal yearbooks and the Amsterdam Cause-of-Death Database, and applying wavelet power spectrum analysis, we identify both persistent winter excess mortality and key disruptions caused by epidemics. For the period 1856–1891, for which continuous cause-specific data is available, our findings reveal that, although airborne infectious diseases largely shaped the winter mortality peak, excess winter deaths remained evident even after their removal. This suggests the important role of other causes-of-death, such as cardiovascular diseases, which are caused by other factors than seasonal viruses. Beyond these findings, it is argued that environmental exposures, such as temperature and reduced sunlight, alongside social inequalities in shaping seasonal vulnerability should be taken into account in future research.

Maternal mortality rates in the 19th-century Netherlands were low compared to other European countries. But was this due to high-quality midwifery care or under-registration? This study examines maternal mortality registration in Maastricht by comparing data from 1870–1879 and 1900–1909 across three sources: municipal reports, individual-level causes of death from the Maastricht Death and Disease Database, and mortality rates based on women who were linked to births up to one year prior to their death. The results indicate under-registration of maternal mortality in the municipal reports. Half of the women who died within 42 days postpartum were recorded with causes unrelated to childbirth. In Maastricht, suspected cover-up causes like peritonitis and fever were not the most commonly used. Instead, tuberculosis, heart disease, and pneumonia were frequently recorded when pregnancy-related factors were omitted from the cause of death.

This paper presents the results of a project creating a linked dataset of census and civil registration records from the county of Derbyshire, England. The proposed method includes women at every stage, first by comparing the performance of deterministic, probabilistic, and household-based linking methods and then expanding the linking process to capture women who have changed names between censuses due to marriage. In census-to-census linking the best results are obtained through a combination of probabilistic and household-based methods, linking between 40% and 45% of the starting population in each decade 1881–1911. The quality of these links and possible impacts of migration patterns are discussed with reference to the representativeness of the linked sample. Incorporating transcribed indexes of marriages (which are freely available online) allows women to be followed in the census across their marriages. Combined, this process reduces the gap in linking success between women and men and especially improves match rates for women in their twenties by between fifteen and twenty percentage points. These data have important potential for future record linking efforts and for research exploring women's work, marriage, and fertility in a life course perspective.

In this new editorial of Historical Life Course Studies key shifts are discussed. We welcome Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora as new co-editor in chief and Eva van der Heijden as associate editor. We thank Luciana Quaranta for her contributions to the development of the journal. Over the past years, Historical Life Course Studies has experienced substantial growth in terms of output and impact. The journal got indexed in Scopus and an application for admission to the Web of Science is pending. Social media engagement and upcoming video releases further enhance the journal's outreach. Gratitude extends to sponsors for Diamond Open Access support, as well as to all authors, reviewers, and readers who jointly contribute to the success of Historical Life Course Studies. The editors look with confidence to the future and hope to welcome many submissions over the next years.

The slavenregisters or slave registers of Suriname offer a unique perspective on the social and demographic history of a people in bondage. Thanks to a citizen science project, the archival sources were transcribed in 2017 by hundreds of volunteers. The transcriptions were used to create a longitudinal database of more than 90,000 enslaved persons. This paper describes the sources, data entry, and cleaning to create a standardized database as well as the matching needed to construct life courses. We discuss the best practices we have learned along the way. Finally, it offers prospects for research and expansion of the database to other population sources and areas.

LINKS stands for 'LINKing System for historical family reconstruction' and is a software system to link nominal data from the Dutch archives and ultimately reconstruct historical individuals and families. We present the background and philosophy of this matching system and explain its data structure and functioning. Currently the core data of the LINKS system consists of indexed civil certificates. These certificates are available from 1812 — the start of the Dutch Vital Registration — until the year they are confidential based on privacy laws. For more than 20 years, thousands of volunteers have been working to build this index, which contains not only the names of newborn, married and deceased persons, but also the names of their parents, places of birth, ages and sometimes their occupational titles. The software system LINKS includes the standardization of all input before linking, nominal record linkage procedures and identification of all unique persons involved in the system. All processes are repeatable and a strict distinction is maintained between source data, standardized, linked and enriched data and released data. Moreover, LINKS also informs archives about all kinds of errors and inconsistencies found during the cleaning and matching process. We will discuss two matching systems, the first is the original querying system that runs within a MySQL database environment and the second is a newly developed system, called burgerLinker, which is based on knowledge graphs and which is designed as a system that can be used independently from LINKS and is made available as open source software. Finally, we present the most important releases of LINKS data so far: two national releases that link birth and parental marriage certificates, creating families and pedigrees and an integrated dataset of persons, families and family trees in four provinces.

This paper summarizes the unique characteristics of the Utah Population Database (UPDB) and how it has catalyzed demographic, social and medical research since the mid-1970s. The UPDB is one of the world’s richest sources of linked population-based information for demographic, genetic, and epidemiological studies at the Individual-level. UPDB has supported hundreds of demographic and biomedical investigations, with heavy emphasis on families, in large part because of its size, representativeness, inclusion of multi-generational pedigrees, and linkages to numerous data sources. The UPDB contains data on over 11 million individuals from the late 18th century to the present. UPDB data represent Utah’s population that appear in administrative records and many of these data are updated due to longstanding efforts to add records as they become available including statewide birth and death certificates, hospitalizations, ambulatory surgeries, and driver licenses. The depth of information within UPDB has been used to support a wide range of family, medical and historical demographic studies which are described here arranged into four broad categories: fertility, mortality, life course analyses and some selected special topics. The paper concludes with a discussion of the future areas of innovation within the UPDB and the types of novel studies that they are likely to facilitate.