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Most previous work on the historical fertility transition has been macro-oriented, using aggregate data to examine economic correlates of demographic behaviour at regional or national levels, while much less has been done using micro data, and specifically looking at behavioural differentials among social groups. In this paper we study at the impact of socioeconomic status on net fertility during the fertility transition in five Northern American and European Countries (Canada, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and the USA). We use micro-level census data in 1900, containing information on number of children by age, occupation of the mother and father, place of residence and household context. The results show highly similar patterns across countries, with the elite and upper middle classes having considerably lower net fertility early in the transition. These patterns remain also after controlling for a range of individual and community-level fertility determinants and geographical unobserved heterogeneity.

New evidence from the Utah Population Database (UPDB) reveals that at the onset of the fertility transition, reproductive behavior was transmitted across generations--between women and their mothers, as well as between women and their husbands' family of origin. Age at marriage, age at last birth, and the number of children ever born are positively correlated in the data, most strongly among first-born daughters and among cohorts born later in the fertility transition. Intergenerational ties, including the presence of mothers and mothers-in-law, influenced the hazard of progressing to a next birth. The findings suggest that the practice of parity-dependent marital fertility control and inter-birth spacing behavior derived in part from the previous generation and that the potential for mothers and mothers-in-law to help in the rearing of children encouraged higher marital fertility.Is fertility between parents and their children positively correlated? Although the first study of intergenerational fertility was conducted more than a century ago, the number of studies remains few. Most investigators report a positive correlation between the fertility of mothers and that of their daughters, but results vary widely. The mechanism linking fertility across generations is also unclear. Early research that advanced the genetic inheritance of fecundity has given way to studies emphasizing a wide range of possible linkages, including the importance of socialization within the family, the transmission of cultural practices and socioeconomic status across generations, and the inheritance of such psychological and biological characteristics as sex drive, fecundity, and health. New research has also extended the earlier focus on correlations in children ever born to include intermediate reproductive indicators and multivariate models of birth spacing. 1In a useful survey of the literature, Murphy concluded that the relationship between the fertility of parents and that of their children has become much more substantial over time. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscriptand daughters' fertility is probably close to zero. If further research supports this conclusion, the fertility transition was a key moment in the emergence of intergenerational transmission of fertility. In an analysis of genealogies compiled by the Utah Genealogical Society, Anderton et al. reported that daughters' fertility levels were responsive to their mothers' relative fertility and age at marriage during the U.S. fertility transition. More recently, Reher, Ortega, and Sanz-Gimeno reported a substantial increase in the strength of intergenerational effects over the course of the fertility transition in twentieth-century Spain, suggesting the growing importance of the transmission of values and attitudes relative to biological dimensions of reproduction. 2This article takes a new look at intergenerational fertility transmission using the Utah Genealogical Dataset obtained from the Utah Resource for Genetic and Epid...

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