Journal of Family History

The nuptiality transition in the Don Army Territory 1867–1916 depended on residence, economy, and religion. In rural areas, population growth and the scarcity of good land undermined the Orthodox tradition, though it was defended by the Church; rural Armenian-Gregorians persisted in early marriage, unlike Old Believers, Buddhists, and Lutherans. In cities, Armenian-Gregorians and Jews, unlike Catholics, adopted late marriage. Age at marriage among Orthodox was slightly later in cities and their hinterlands, against the tradition that Church conservatism favored. The different trajectories of nuptiality reveal a struggle between religion, economics, and urban life, making nuptiality a scene of contradictory influences.

This paper considers the contemporary significance of family history and, more generally, cross-national heritage by studying a Swedish television programme in which Swedish Americans visit Sweden to find out more about their ancestors and possibly to meet present-day relatives. Saar’s theory of three levels of genealogy—history, evaluation, and genre—is used as the analytical framework. The findings indicate that the contemporary significance of family history is multilayered and complex, and is acknowledged to be of great importance in self-reflection, self-understanding, and a sense of rootedness.

Misogamist discourse prevailed among western European early modern scholars. This article examines whether misogamist discourse translated into behaviour in the Dutch Republic. We identify marriage trends of professors employed by the universities of Leiden and Utrecht in the seventeenth century, using quantitative and qualitative approaches. We analysed a prosopographical dataset of professors and their wives, explored here through several case studies. Against views of exceptionality, seclusion and celibacy in scholarly culture, based on self-fashioning and a handful of memorable examples, we argue that scholars overall replicated and intensified the European Marriage Pattern, and marriage strategies of the Dutch civic elite.

This article, based upon 199 police reports of disobedience cases in Republican Beijing, examines the relationship between family and state in modern China. It argues that these cases, on the one hand, helped the family transfer the domestic crises to the state, and on the other hand, consolidated the state cult of filial piety and facilitated the everyday intervention of the state into society. But the collusion between family and state also led to some unexpected consequences, in which the state's representative institutions such as the police and the reformatory, with their availability and affordability, actually increased the visibility of filial impiety.

The trends in marriage and divorce among male and female same-sex couples in urban and rural Norway were compared to different-sex marriages. Norway legalized same-sex living in 1993 and marriage in 2009. Cohorts from 1993 to 2018 were included. The 2009 gender-neutral marriage law appears to have had minimal impact on the rate of same-sex unions and divorces. Moreover, divorce risks are highest in female same-sex marriages, whereas male same-sex marriages have the same divorce risk levels as different-sex marriages. The divorce risk is declining for same-sex marriages in urban areas, while the opposite is observed in rural areas.

In the patriarchal lineage management system in China, only men possess the right to run a lineage. However, by analyzing the power and status of the wives of the Dukes for Fufilling the Sage in the management of the Kong lineage in Qufu since the Qing Dynasty, this study finds that these women played an important role in lineage management. They performed the duties of the dukes under special circumstances and became the highest decision makers of the lineage. This study further analyzes the reasons why the duchesses could exercise management power in the Kong lineage.