Rick Mourits

International Institute of Social History | IISG

The limits to human lifespan are a widely discussed topic. Yet, later-life mortality and longevity are generally studied from a genetic perspective, while the social dimension has received less attention. This paper gives a systematic overview of trends in later-life mortality and longevity for cohorts that were born in the late 18th and 19th centu...

Survival to extreme ages clusters within families. However, identifying genetic loci conferring longevity and low morbidity in such longevous families is challenging. There is debate concerning the survival percentile that best isolates the genetic component in longevity. Here, we use three-generational mortality data from two large datasets, UPDB...

Studies have shown that long-lived individuals seem to pass their survival advantage on to their offspring. Offspring of long-lived parents had a lifelong survival advantage over individuals without long-lived parents, making them more likely to become long-lived themselves. We test whether the survival advantage enjoyed by offspring of long-lived...

It remains unknown how different types of sources affect the reconstruction of life courses and families in large-scale databases increasingly common in demographic research. Here, we compare family and life-course reconstructions for 495 individuals simultaneously present in two well-known Dutch data sets: LINKS, based on the Zeeland province’s fu...

For the Netherlands, a rich new data source has become available which contains indexed civil certificates for multiple generations of individuals: LINKS. The current version of the dataset contains information on 1.7 million demographic events for the province of Zeeland in the 19th and early 20th centuries and will be extended to other provinces...

One of the biggest challenges in the transition to open science is making data interoperable. Ideally, existing schemas and vocabularies are (re-)used to describe data, but these are generally problematic for historical data, as they exclude historical concepts and are insensitive to temporal variations in meaning. Therefore, the subdiscipline of h...

This study aims to identify engagement profiles in the citizen humanities and assess whether these profiles match those found in prior studies on crowd-based projects in the natural sciences. To this purpose, we use the log data from the citizen humanities project ‘Historical Database Suriname and the Caribbean’, in which volunteers transcribe the...

Reconstruction of historical persons and family ties is the bread and butter of many researchers and genealogists. With the increasing digital availability of historical person records, the scope and depth of person reconstructions speaks to the imagination of researchers and genealogists. Yet, the lack of standardisation in the description of hist...

Vast amounts of heterogeneous knowledge are becoming publicly available in the form of knowledge graphs, often linking multiple sources of data that have never been together before, and thereby enabling scholars to answer many new research questions. It is often not known beforehand, however, which questions the data might have the answers to, pote...

The slavenregisters or slave registers of Suriname offer a unique perspective on the social and demographic history of a people in bondage. Thanks to a citizen science project, the archival sources were transcribed in 2017 by hundreds of volunteers. The transcriptions were used to create a longitudinal database of more than 90,000 enslaved persons....

LINKS stands for 'LINKing System for historical family reconstruction' and is a software system to link nominal data from the Dutch archives and ultimately reconstruct historical individuals and families. We present the background and philosophy of this matching system and explain its data structure and functioning. Currently the core data of the L...

The European Experience brings together the expertise of nearly a hundred historians from eight European universities to internationalise and diversify the study of modern European history, exploring a grand sweep of time from 1500 to 2000. Offering a valuable corrective to the Anglocentric narratives of previous English-language textbooks, scholar...

Many historical and contemporary studies have shown that migrants enjoy survival advantages over non-migrants, even if they originate from higher mortality regimes and have a lower socioeconomic and educational status compared to non-migrants in the destination area. This so-called migrant mortality advantage or healthy migrant effect is explained...

A century after the Spanish Flu, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought renewed attention to socioeconomic and occupational differences in mortality in the earlier pandemic. The magnitude of these differences and the pathways between occupation and increased mortality remain unclear, however. In this paper, we explore the relation between occupational c...

Zonder geordende, cijfermatige gegevens is het lastig om de gevolgen van slavernij inzichtelijk te maken. De gruwelen van het bijhouden van de Surinaamse polders zullen niet snel terugkomen in de memoires van plantage-eigenaren. In hun ogen was het werk noodzakelijk om de plantages vruchtbaar en bereikbaar te houden. De slavenregisters en monsterro...

Nous cherchons à identifier les facteurs qui influent sur les regroupements spatiaux de longévité, et qui permettent de repérer si les avantages en termes de survie interviennent à une période précoce de l’existence ou plus tard, ou encore tout au long de l’existence. Pour reconstruire la vie d’une cohorte d’habitants de la Zélande nés entre 1812 e...

Are daughters of older mothers less fertile? The human mutation rate is high and increases with chronological age. As female oocytes age, they become less functional, reducing female chances at successful reproduction. Increased oocyte mutation loads at advanced age may be passed on to offspring, decreasing fertility among daughters born to older m...

A century ago, the 1918–19 influenza pandemic swept across the globe, taking the lives of over 50 million people. We use data from the Dutch civil registry to show which regions in the Netherlands were most affected by the 1918–19 pandemic. We do so for the entire 1918 year as well as the first, second, and third wave that hit the Netherlands in su...

One of the most important goals of digital humanities is to provide researchers with data and tools for new research questions, either by increasing the scale of scholarly studies, linking existing databases, or improving the accessibility of data. Here, the FAIR principles provide a useful framework. Integrating data from diverse humanities domain...

Finding and linking different appearances of the same entity in an open Web setting is one of the primary challenges of the Semantic Web. In social and economic history, record linkage has dealt with this problem for a long time, linking historical individual records at a local database level. With the advent of semantic technologies, Knowledge Gra...

Are daughters of older mothers less fertile? The human mutation rate is high and increases with chronological age. As female oocytes age, they become less functional, reducing female chances at successful reproduction. Increased oocyte mutation loads at advanced age may be passed on to offspring, decreasing fertility among daughters born to older m...

https://hdl.handle.net/10622/88ZXD8

Studies have shown that long-lived individuals seem to pass their survival advantage on to their offspring. Offspring of long-lived parents had a lifelong survival advantage over individuals without long-lived parents, making them more likely to become long-lived themselves. We test whether the survival advantage enjoyed by offspring of long-lived...

One of the most important goals of digital humanities is to provide researchers with data and tools for new research questions, either by increasing the scale of scholarly studies, linking existing databases, or improving the accessibility of data. Here, the FAIR principles provide a useful framework as these state that data needs to be: Findable,...

Exceptional lives tend to cluster in a limited number of extraordinary families. Individuals born into ‘long-lived families’ are thought to possess resources that benefit healthy ageing. Not only are they more likely to become long-lived, they are also less likely to die at any given age than individuals without long-lived family members. This thes...

Database of the slave registers of Suriname from 1830 to 1863, including all books of the slave registers still in existence. The dataset contains 161,790 individual records. The slave registers of Suriname were kept uptodate continuously from 1826 until the abolition of slavery in the Dutch colonies on the 1st of July 1863. This database contains...

There are places that bring forth unexpectedly large numbers of long-lived individuals. In this study, we explore which factors affect geographic clustering of longevity and indicate whether survival advantages occur early in life, later in life, or over the entire lifespan. 150 years of mortality data are used to reconstruct the lifespans of the 1...

Survival to extreme ages clusters within families. However, identifying genetic loci conferring longevity and low morbidity in such longevous families is challenging. There is debate concerning the survival percentile that best isolates the genetic component in longevity. Here, we use three-generational mortality data from two large datasets, UPDB...

Here you find a release of the standardized and coded values of 134,964 different occupational titles found in the sources used by the HSN until the 1st of July 2018. All these occupational titles have been coded into HISCO, HISCLASS, HISCAM, OCC1950 and SOCPO classifications. The process of coding of the occupational titles followed three stages:...

In demographic research large-scale individual-level data have become increasingly available. At the same time, it remains unknown how varying sources affect the reconstruction of individual life courses and families in databases. In this paper, we conduct individual-level comparisons of family and life course reconstructions of 495 individuals sim...

The study of social class and corresponding measurement schemes has evolved separately in Europe and the US. On both continents a standardized occupational coding system exists that can be transferred into a wide scala of measures of socioeconomic status. This dataset contains a crosswalk between the two standardized historical occupational coding...

How to define who exactly qualifies as middle class is a long-standing discussion, but has been given new impetus by recent contributions in behavioural economics and social psychology. This study investigates the plausibility of the claim that the middle class can be meaningfully defined as those with higher levels of mental well-being. To this pu...

Recently, the conceptualization of ‘middle class’ – traditionally the domain of sociologists – has received a new impetus by increased attention from development economists who try to explain the success of emerging economies. How to define who exactly qualify as middle class is a longstanding discussion and how this category can influence the grow...

Recently, the conceptualization of ‘middle class’ – traditionally the domain of sociologists – has received a new impetus by increased attention from development economists who try to explain the success of emerging economies. How to define who exactly qualify as middle class is a long-standing discussion and how this category can influence the gro...

Hulpverleners betrokken bij de problematiek van jonge moeders geven regelmatig aan dat gezinsopvang (opvang in pleeg- of gastgezinnen en gezinshuizen) mogelijk geschikt zou kunnen zijn voor jonge moeders en hun baby. Het ministerie van VWS heeft gevraagd om een verkenning van de mogelijkheden op dit gebied, met daarbij speciale aandacht voor de mog...