HPDT at European Society of Historical Demography Conference, Leuven, Belgium, 24-27 September 2016

The paper presented at ESHD (Leuven, Belgium) by Oana Sorescu-Iudean and Ioan Bolovan (”Aspects on Transylvanian marriages in the second half of 19th Century based on Historical Population Database of Transylvania”, with Luminita Dumanescu) provides preliminary results on a scale of analysis that has previously been unknown to the region of Transylvania, owing to the amount of information
contained in the Historical Population Database of Transylvania.
We have selected for analysis two micro-zones, on the basis of structural similarity: one central locality that can be understood as low-urban or semi-urban in a Southeast European frame of definition and a series of adjacent smaller villages, which functioned often as starting-points for internal migration targeting the centre. The analyse has shown that, in the Transylvanian case, as a region situated on the ‘fringes’ of the eastern European marriage pattern, mean age at first marriage could witness considerable fluctuations even in close-by regions, owing to different economic environments and paces of development. Instead of framing our results into extant categorization imposed from above, with little attention to historical context or to data representativeness, we have ascertained which factors influenced age at marriage for both women and men in two selected micro regions in Transylvania.