Oferta y demanda de criados rurales en Holanda, 1760-1920. El caso de Groningen

Until the end of the nineteenth century a system of live-in servants on farms was widespread in large parts of Europe. This practise played an important role in the life cycle of large numbers of rural inhabitants. In the relatively capitalistic agricultural clay son area of Groningen (The Netherlands), the breakdown of this system proved to be mainly Ihe result of a change in strategy within the live-in labour supplying families. Rising real wages facilitated a growing preference to keep family Iife and freedom for the children. In addition, it is argued that live-in servants, though earning a higher income, probably had worse prospects than those who stayed on in their parental home. After World War I the system of live-in servants almost completely disappeared because now richer farmers desired more privacy, keeping a maid only for domestic work

The Groningen Integral History Cohort Database:Development, Design and Output

The Groningen Integral History project launched in 1987 aimed to sketch the lives of people from various social classes in the Dutch province of Groningen in the 19th and early 20th century. One part was the creation of the Groningen Integral History Cohort Database (GIHCD), reconstructing complete individual life courses of 5,280 persons (RPs) born between 1811 and 1872. The quality of the database has become very high by now, despite the lengthy and difficult process of shaping it over 35 years. More than 98% of the RPs (and for some parts of the database even more than 99%) could be followed until their death or until a migration abroad. Even for the life courses of those moving abroad information is available for most RPs. In this article, we primarily focus on the rural part of the database (n=4,320), the quality of which is the highest and has had the most significant tangible research impact. Building on information from the Dutch civil registration system (from 1811) and the population registers (from 1850), the database includes multiple individual-level variables. In the technical part of the article, we provide an extensive overview of the available variables and summarize the transformation of the rural part of the database into an Intermediate Data Structure (IDS). Since the early 1990s, historians from the University of Groningen have used GIHCD in quite some publications. At the end of this article, we provide a summary of the main outcomes of these publications

Measuring the age-dependent economic costs and benefits of children and juveniles:Annual auctions of pauper orphans

Using the poor relief accounts of Appingedam (the Netherlands), the price that foster families want to receive as a reward for caring for male and female orphans has been calculated. Clearly, only when children were around the age of 15, their labour was seen as so productive that it was interesting to pay them a high enough wage to cover costs of clothing and so on) and provide them with board and lodging. In this way, the data show that - at least in short run and for this case - it was not in any way economic interesting to have many children, as they cost at least for 13-14 years much more than they earned