From Matched Certificates to Related Persons

For the Netherlands, a rich new data source has become available which contains indexed civil certificates for multiple generations of individuals: LINKS. The current version of the dataset contains information on 1.7 million demographic events for the province of Zeeland in the 19th and early 20th centuries and will be extended to other provinces in the Netherlands in the near future. To be able to study demographic behaviour, life courses and family relations need to be reconstructed from the civil certificates. This paper describes the steps that are taken to move from the LINKS database, which contains digitised birth, marriage, and death certificates and relational information between individuals on these certificates, to LINKS-gen, which contains over six hundred thousand life courses, family reconstructions for up to seven generations, and fertility, marital, mortality, and occupational status information, ready for analysis. We present procedures for variable construction and data cleaning. Furthermore, we give a short overview of the LINKS database, discuss quality checks, and give advice on selection of relevant cases necessary to move from LINKS to LINKS-gen. The paper is accompanied by R-scripts to convert and construct the datafiles

Unequal excess mortality during the Spanish Flu pandemic in the Netherlands

A century after the Spanish Flu, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought renewed attention to socioeconomic and occupational differences in mortality in the earlier pandemic. The magnitude of these differences and the pathways between occupation and increased mortality remain unclear, however. In this paper, we explore the relation between occupational characteristics and excess mortality among men during the Spanish Flu pandemic in the Netherlands. By creating a new occupational coding for exposure to disease at work, we separate social status and occupational conditions for viral transmission. We use a new data set based on men’s death certificates to calculate excess mortality rates by region, age group, and occupational group. Using OLS regression models, we estimate whether social position, regular interaction in the workplace, and working in an enclosed space affected excess mortality among men in the Netherlands in the autumn of 1918. We find some evidence that men with occupations that featured high levels of social contact had higher mortality in this period. Above all, however, we find a strong socioeconomic gradient to excess mortality among men during the Spanish Flu pandemic, even after accounting for exposure in the workplace

Families in comparison: An individual-level comparison of life-course and family reconstructions between population and vital event registers

It remains unknown how different types of sources affect the reconstruction of life courses and families in large-scale databases increasingly common in demographic research. Here, we compare family and life-course reconstructions for 495 individuals simultaneously present in two well-known Dutch data sets: LINKS, based on the Zeeland province’s full-population vital event registration data (passive registration), and the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN), based on a national sample of birth certificates, with follow-up of individuals in population registers (active registration). We compare indicators of fertility, marriage, mortality, and occupational status, and conclude that reconstructions in the HSN and LINKS reflect each other well: LINKS provides more complete information on siblings and parents, whereas the HSN provides more complete life-course information. We conclude that life-course and family reconstructions based on linked passive registration of individuals constitute a reliable alternative to reconstructions based on active registration, if case selection is carefully considered

Linking Dutch civil certificates

Finding and linking different appearances of the same entity in an open Web setting is one of the primary challenges of the Semantic Web. In social and economic history, record linkage has dealt with this problem for a long time, linking historical individual records at a local database level. With the advent of semantic technologies, Knowledge Graphs containing these records have been published, raising the need for large-scale linking techniques that consider the particularities of historical individual linking. In this paper we focus on our current investigation of such techniques to link the Dutch civil certificates in the LINKS/CLARIAH project. We describe the production of the LINKS Knowledge Graph, and we show its potential at answering domain research questions through its large number of owl:sameAs links

Slavery in Suriname. A Reconstruction of Life Courses, 1830–1863

The slavenregisters or slave registers of Suriname offer a unique perspective on the social and demographic history of a people in bondage. Thanks to a citizen science project, the archival sources were transcribed in 2017 by hundreds of volunteers. The transcriptions were used to create a longitudinal database of more than 90,000 enslaved persons. This paper describes the sources, data entry, and cleaning to create a standardized database as well as the matching needed to construct life courses. We discuss the best practices we have learned along the way. Finally, it offers prospects for research and expansion of the database to other population sources and areas

A modular approach toward producing nanotherapeutics targeting the innate immune system.

Immunotherapies controlling the adaptive immune system are firmly established, but regulating the innate immune system remains much less explored. The intrinsic interactions between nanoparticles and phagocytic myeloid cells make these materials especially suited for engaging the innate immune system. However, developing nanotherapeutics is an elaborate process. Here, we demonstrate a modular approach that facilitates efficiently incorporating a broad variety of drugs in a nanobiologic platform. Using a microfluidic formulation strategy, we produced apolipoprotein A1-based nanobiologics with favorable innate immune system-engaging properties as evaluated by in vivo screening. Subsequently, rapamycin and three small-molecule inhibitors were derivatized with lipophilic promoieties, ensuring their seamless incorporation and efficient retention in nanobiologics. A short regimen of intravenously administered rapamycin-loaded nanobiologics (mTORi-NBs) significantly prolonged allograft survival in a heart transplantation mouse model. Last, we studied mTORi-NB biodistribution in nonhuman primates by PET/MR imaging and evaluated its safety, paving the way for clinical translation.This work was supported by NIH grants R01 CA220234, R01 HL144072, P01 HL131478, and NWO/ZonMW Vici 91818622 (to W.J.M.M.); R01 HL143814 and P01HL131478 (to Z.A.F.); R01 AI139623 (to J.O.); and P30 CA008748 (to T.R.). M.M.T.v.L. was supported by the American Heart Association (grant 19PRE34380423). M.G.N. was supported by a Spinoza grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research and an ERC Advanced Grant (no. 833247); L.A.B.J. was supported by a Competitiveness Operational Programme grant of the Romanian Ministry of European Funds (P_37_762, MySMIS 103587).S

Later-Life Mortality and Longevity in Late-18th and 19th-Century Cohorts. Where Are We Now, and Where Are We Heading?

The limits to human lifespan are a widely discussed topic. Yet, later-life mortality and longevity are generally studied from a genetic perspective, while the social dimension has received less attention. This paper gives a systematic overview of trends in later-life mortality and longevity for cohorts that were born in the late 18th and 19th century, and shows that the average population and the top survivors from cohorts born between 1800 and 1850 were already growing older. These improvements in human survival were similar for both of the sexes among the top survivors, whereas gender equality in the life expectancy at age 50 grew rapidly in cohorts born after 1880. Differences between populations were determined by the disease environment, availability of food, and local diets, while lifestyles and social support from spouses and kin affected later-life expectancy and longevity within these populations. These findings have major implications on how we view the demographic and epidemiological transition, and forces us to reconsider existing explanations for improvements in survival during the 19th century. However, in order to find out the determinants of later-life mortality, external validity of results, blind spots due to missing data, and familial clustering need to be studied more thoroughly

Women born to older mothers have reduced fertility: Evidence from a natural fertility population

Are daughters of older mothers less fertile? The human mutation rate is high and increases with chronological age. As female oocytes age, they become less functional, reducing female chances at successful reproduction. Increased oocyte mutation loads at advanced age may be passed on to offspring, decreasing fertility among daughters born to older mothers. In this paper we study the effects of maternal ageing on her daughter's fertility, including total number of children, age at last birth, and neonatal mortality among her children. We study fertility histories of two generations of women from disjoint families from a pre-transitional historical population in the Dutch province of Zeeland. Using mixed effect Poisson models to take within family (sibling) relations into account, we show that fertility is reduced among married daughters who were born at advanced maternal age, with fewer children ever born and earlier ages at last birth. We do not find consistent evidence for effects on neonatal mortality. These results may indicate that women born to older mothers are negatively affected by their mothers' increased oocyte mutation load

Retracing hotbeds of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic. Spatial differences in seasonal excess mortality in the Netherlands

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