The birth statistics of Massachusetts during the Nineteenth Century

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Abstract
The paper describes a series of procedures developed to test the accuracy of the birth statistics collected in the State of Massachusetts from the year 1842, when the first vital registration system to be established in the United States was inaugurated, to the end of the nineteenth century; a period of sixty years. The procedures, each of which is defined in general terms in the early portion of the paper, are called the documentary method, the expectation method and the comparative method. The paper also presents estimates of the degree of underregistration in the statistics for a number of years during the course of the century, as achieved by the application of these methods. It is shown, for instance, that under-registration declined from a level of about 70% in the early 1840's to about 2 % in 1900. Several illustrations of the precise manner in which the methods were used to derive these estimates are given in an appendix. Finally estimated birth rates for different years of the century, obtained by correcting the registration statistics in terms of the estimates of under-registration, are presented.

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