Abstract

PIP: Data on the fertility of mothers and daughters in 10,931 mother-daughter pairs were obtained from family reconstitution studies based on English parish registers between the 16th and 19th centuries. This paper seeks to evaluate the proposition that more fecund mothers tend to have more fecund daughters. There seems to be no association between the fertility of daughters and that of their mothers; however, the correlation coefficient apparently indicates a very small, yet significant, positive association. This small positive association between the fertility of daughters and that of their mothers in the whole sample is due entirely to the situation in 1 parish. A woman's fertility might depend on her husband's biological characteristics as well as her own. Thus, the finding here is not only that there is no association between the fecundity of daughters and that of their mothers but none between that of daughters and fathers either.