Parish Registers as a Genealogical Source for Demographic Study in a Rural Community of Guimarães (Portugal): Illegitimacy in the 17th and 18th Centuries.

António Gonçalves , UNIVERSITY OF MINHO / INDEPENDENT RESEARCHER

Based on Parish Register Books, this study focuses on a micro-demographic analysis of the parish of Santa Maria de Vila Nova das Infantas (Guimarães, Portugal), examining variables such as nuptiality, fertility, mortality, and marital mobility through their various indicators. Given the documentary gaps found in parish records, cross-referencing multiple sources proved essential to reduce the degree of uncertainty in the reconstitution of families. The research relies on the SRP (Parish Reconstitution System), an application that structures a family file—where data on births, marriages, and deaths are recorded and cross-linked—and an individual file generated from it. The analysis reveals that the demographic behaviors of this community exhibit specific characteristics, although they generally conform to the models already identified for the Minho region during the Ancien Régime. However, one particularly striking result emerges: the high rate of illegitimate births, which calls for a reassessment of legitimate fertility levels previously estimated. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in contrast with most European populations of the time, this community displayed abnormally high levels of illegitimacy, with certain decades showing nearly one quarter of all births occurring outside wedlock. Several explanatory factors can be identified: the increasing age at first marriage among women, the mobility of the male labor force, unmarried women’s survival strategies through motherhood, and premarital conceptions resulting from consanguineous unions awaiting ecclesiastical authorization.

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 Presented in Session P8. Demographic Trends, History, Data and Methods