What Determines Family Size? Irish Farming Families in Nineteenth-Century Ontario

Abstract

The literature on the family in historical perspective has had an enduring interest in the determinants of family size, as well as related factors that have been considered to act as causal variables of this phenomenon. Various approaches have been proposed—cultural, economic, sociological, and demographic, to name a few—with no clear decision emerging in favor of one perspective or another. This article is an analysis of the issue of family size that uses as its research database an Irish farming community in eastern Ontario, Canada, during the 1861-1871 period. A number of strategies are used, such as comparing family size with the size of landholdings and with the changing structural components of Irish families. The issue of family size determinants is deemed to be a multifaceted one that is most advantageously viewed from a cultural relativist perspective.