Last Generations and Households of Stem Family in Southern Europe. A case study of Catalonia (Spain) 19th -20th centuries.

Inés Gil Torras, University of Bologna
Joana Maria Pujades Mora, Open University Of Catalonia & Center For Demographic Studies, Universitat Autònoma De Barcelona

Stem family system is characterized by the impartibility of the household patrimony following the primogeniture rule of descendants and the multigenerational co-residence of the heir with his parents and children in the parental home. This system was widely spread in pre-industrial northern, southern, and central Europe. In Catalonia, it is reported to have started consolidating in the 10th century, and began its fall only in the second half of the 19th century (Casa de Velázquez, 1986; Ferrer Alòs, 2003; Ferrer i Alòs, 2005; González, 1991; Maluquer De Motes Bernet, 1998; To Figueras, 1993). However, little is known about its erosion and the family mechanisms by which it gave way to the predominance of the nuclear family. In this sense, the paper aims to analyze the reproduction, adaptation, and change of household arrangements of 5 municipalities in the Baix Llobregat region in Catalonia (Spain) between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries using the BALL demographic database. This database allows following the individuals (and families) across time and space (Pujadas-Mora et al., 2022, 2019), which allows applying Sequence Analysis to provide a visual representation of the changes in household structure across the lifetime of the individuals of the municipalities, and event history analysis to study the transitions of heirs and his siblings out of the traditional model. The preliminary results show that the fall of the Stem family not only took place later than expected by the previous findings in the literature but also that it was a slow adaptative process rather than an abrupt change. This study demonstrates the strong cultural persistence of this family organization. Moreover, this work is the first one documenting the process of change in the stem family system using longitudinal individual-level data in northern Spain.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 9. Evaluating Data Quality I