Family and Fertility in Rural Ohio: Wood County, Oiuo in 1860

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Abstract
One of the lacunae in research on nineteenth-century American house holds is the relative scarcity of systematic studies using individual-level census data on rural populations. This essay uses individual-level data from the 1860 federal manuscript census of Wood County, Ohio to provide base-line data for comparison with similar studies by other scholars whose focus has been on regions other than the rural Midwest. The questions that were asked and the methods and techniques that were used to analyze the data in this essay were selected to increase comparability with other work. The variables analyzed are wealth, age, sex, ethnicity, structural type of household, fertility, rural-urban residence, and the occupation of married household heads. The findings are, for the most part, supportive of other research on the same subjects.

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