Histon 1901

Many people - including those who research their own family history and even some historians - have mistaken ideas about marriage, family formation, and mortality in the British past. This talk will correct some of these assumptions and discuss why it is so tempting to believe them.

With the help of lots of images - source material such as censuses and parish records, family photographs, maps, and some straightforward (and carefully explained) graphs - the talk will put family and local population histories into a broader temporal and geographic context.

Alice Reid has lived in Cambridge for 30 years. She is Professor of Demography at the Geography Department, University of Cambridge, and Co-Director of Campop (the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure). Most of her work examines geographic and social differences in population processes in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but the talk will draw on a wider body of work from Campop's 60 year lifetime.