Adapting methods to needs: studying fertility and nuptiality in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Belgium.

The authors describe and evaluate a series of historical demographic methods that fall between family reconstitution and aggregative methods and that were developed during a study of the demographic impact of early industrialization on the processes of fertility, nuptiality, and migration in Verviers, Belgium. The methods involve the use of truncated fertility histories for the first few years of marriage rather than complete fertility histories. The authors suggest that the methods proposed are an effective means of reducing the cost of accumulating data while increasing the number of cases studied.