Residence Patterns and Demographic Constraints

Abstract

This article provides an account of how demographic conditions have shaped co-coresidence patterns in historic Eastern Europe. Census microdata from eighteenth-century Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine are confronted with the computer microsimulation of kin sets to show how the combined effects of fertility, marriage, and mortality influenced the availability of kin for coresidence. The enactment of demographic constraints on residential chances is illustrated by exploring two issues central to historical demographic interest: leaving home and intergenerational coresidence. This article closes with an agenda for comparative studies of historical household systems that takes demographic constraints on coresidence more seriously into account.