Abstract
Family reconstitution or Henry-Fleury method in historical demography was developed by French demographers in 1950s. It has been revised recently by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. In this paper, Yasumoto reports the observation of the activity of this Group, particularly the family reconstitution method using the parish registers from 1538 in England, in the first part. In the second part, Hayami analyzes Shumon-aratame-cho (religious faith registers) of Yokouchi village in Shinano Province from 1671 to 1871. He has already published general survey of populaiton trends of this village in the previous work, but the family reconstitution is introduced here. Through this method the demographic behavior of families can be traced numerically. The figures shown in this paper are as follows: 1. Fertility by age groups of married women, 2. Relations between the age of marriages and the number of births, 3. Relatins between the years of married life and the number of births, 4. Intervals of births, 5. Child mortality. The numbers of couple which can be traced here are only 168. This is not sufficient for any conclusion. But we are gathering and analyzing another cases. Shumon-aratame-cho is the worthiest sources in the meaning of historical demography if it covers long years continuously. We consider that we can compare our observations with those of the other countries.
