World History Conference, Sydney, 3-9 July 2005
Abstract:
Reconstructing a rural community: the use of civil registration data
Glenda Strachan
This paper outlines the major source of data used in a reconstruction of a rural community in
Australia, which emphasises the role of women and children, or family units 1 in rural
settlement. There has been little research about the settlement and community structures on
the more fertile coastal plain of eastern Australia, an area which Frost 2 terms ‘the wet frontier’.
The study can be termed a 'micro-history' because of its detailed evaluation of the community
activity in a small geographical area.3 The importance of regional differences in patterns of
change is emphasised in the work of Szreter on fertility change for
the relative successes of the intensive, contextual approach characteristic of anthropological
field work seem now to be attracting more and more demographers to such local microstudies, even where the ultimate aim remains the elucidation of large-scale demographic
change, such as nation-wide fertility change.4
This study of the Upper Williams Valley relies principally on a social reconstruction of Dungog
and its surrounding agricultural area. Social reconstruction is an expansion of the
methodology of population reconstitution, which has been used for several decades in
Europe. In England population estimates, fertility and mortality trends were established using
parish registers.5 This analysis of a population relies on family reconstitution, that is ‘the
systematic assemblage and articulation of information about the life histories of families’ 6 in
order to describe its chief demographic characteristics of birth, marriage and death, a method
which allows the community’s demographic history to be ‘examined in greater detail and with
greater precision than by any other method’. 7
Centuries of data are not available for Australia so that population reconstitution along the
lines of Wrigley and Schofield is not possible but the technique of using the individual
registration of demographic events to establish details of the life of a community can be used.
Sources used for research on the community in the Upper Williams Valley are the records of
civil registration, the baptismal, marriage and burial records of the Church of England Parish
of Dungog as well as census data, agricultural records, and local newspaper reports. While
census records have been destroyed in Australia, civil registration records provide great detail
about family events. The use of this demographic information begins the process of the
recreation of the life histories of individuals and the economic, family and social relations
between them and can be expanded to include further sources of information. The use of a
range of sources moves the project into the realm of ‘social reconstruction’, rather than
population reconstitution, and allows the project to address questions raised in social and
labour history.
For this research the information on individuals is being entered into a computer database.
Computerised databases automate manual information systems and numerous studies have
1
It is acknowledged that the family may be a site of struggle and contested demands and claims along
the lines raised by Heidi Hartmann, "The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class and Political Struggle:
The Example of Housework", Signs, 6, 3, 1981, 366-394.
2
Frost, ‘Farmers, Government, and the Environment', p. 19.
3
Barry Reay, Microhistories, Cambridge University, Cambridge, 1997, ch. 1.
4
Simon Szreter, Fertility, class and gender in Britain, 1860-1940, Cambridge University, Cambridge,
1996, p. 35.
5
E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541-1871, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1981; Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen and Schofield, English Population
History from Family Reconstitution 1580-1837.
6
Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen and Schofield, English Population History, p. 12.
7
P. Laslett, D. Eversley and W. Armstrong, An Introduction to English Historical Demography,
Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1966, p. 96.
http://www.lifecoursesincontext.nl/documents/abstract_d_strachan.doc
used such databases as they provide ‘an exceptionally useful tool for editing, storing, and
classifying the collected information, and for conducting the simplest retrievals and summary
measures by way of analysis’.8 The sophistication of a database management system such
as Access, which is the one chosen for this project, allows researchers to ask more complex
questions of the material than was practical using a manual system with file cards. The
philosophy of the Dungog community database is to keep as much richness of the data in the
original source as possible so that the researcher is not restricted to answering a limited
number of pre-defined questions. This contrasts with another style of database, for example
Quinlan and Gardner’s study of trade unions, which uses a wide range of newspaper sources
to collect a narrow range of information and ask a narrow range of questions. 9
This paper outlines the details of the database. To date the database records number 12,159
Events and 62,294 persons. The paper presents examples of the information that can be
gained using the details of civil registration in Australia.
Daniel Greenstein, A Historian’s Guide to Computing, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994, p. 112.
Michael Quinlan and Margaret Gardner, ‘Researching Industrial Relations History: The Development
of a Database on Australian Trade Unions 1825-1900’, Labour History, 66, 1994, pp. 90-113.
8
9
http://www.lifecoursesincontext.nl/documents/abstract_d_strachan.doc