ABSTRACT
The majority of children in these four centuries were born intoand grew up in families. Families were part of larger communities, but the child’s most formative experiences took place within the family. Over the last forty years historians have tried in two rapidly converging ways to write the history of families. The first of these is known as ‘family reconstitution’; using census returns of various kinds, methodologies have been established which enable historians to speak with some confidence of the size and composition of both households and families. The second approach is variously referred to as ‘household economics’ or ‘family strategy’. The aim is to understand the particular form which households or families took, and to explain changes over time. It is argued that family strategies may change in response to changing external conditions, or indeed that changing family strategies may themselves alter the external environment. Thus whereas the first approach can give us profiles of communities at certain points in time, the second explores the dynamics of change. The distinction between these two approaches has become blurred as it has become obvious to practitioners that both are necessary for an understanding of the history of the family.
