Frans van Poppel: a sort of farewell. Liber Amicorum. - NIDI

of further aspects of marriage, divorce and fertility. Let me just mention the questions of theseasonality of marriage, the remarriage of widowers, the effects of changes in legislation ondivorce, of the role of health selection in the marital transition, of the behaviour of widowersin a small city, of changes in the proper age of marriage, in the degree of homogamy and ofthe problems encountered when trying to overcome the death of one of the marrriage partners.It is a rich display of topics and interests and the collaboraters tend to change with the issue.If one consults an international database on mortality, chances are that one finds a note thatthe data on the Netherlands have been supplied by Frans van Poppel. And indeed, togetherwith several others Frans has done his utmost to try and construct cohort and period life tablesfrom the earliest possible date. I have always found the two estimates of life expectancyat birth for the first half of the 19 th century very useful in illustrating the magnitude of thechanges in the last decades. For the years 1827-1828 life expectancy at birth in the Netherlandsapparently only reached 36.6 years while for 1840-1851 it may even have been half a yearless. Just as in the case of marriage and fertility Frans has constantly sought to broaden ourhorizon and to push the boundaries of our knowledge further away. One aspect concernsdifferental mortality: How large were the differences between rural and urban areas, betweenthe sexes, between social classes, at different ages, and just after birth or when people hadbecome aged? Investigating the causes of death, changes in the state of health as self-reportedand the increase in the probability of death following the loss of a parent or a partner. Therelation between marital status and mortality also received attention, while the survival ofillegitimate children in comparison to their legitimate counterparts similarly was the subjectof a study. Again, just as regarding fertility and marriage, Frans gave the role of religion hisspecial attention. Did it result in differences in infant and childhood mortality? In all of thiswork, that in fact one can see grow almost organically under his hands, Frans always was onthe alert for the possibility of international comparisons and when international programmesin historical demography were being launched the organizers commonly found in Frans theirrepresentative for the Netherlands.In all of his work Frans kept an open eye for the theoretical aspects of a study and the largerframework in which the topics selected had to find their place. His extensive knowledge ofpopulation literature built up over many years of reading and acting as a sort of custodian ofthe NIDI library paid off handsomely on such occasions.EpilogueI must admit that with two exceptions, that is when both of us were on the NIDI staff andwhen Frans was the Rogier professor at the University of Nijmegen, I had no reason to followFrans’s career very closely. From a certain distance I was happy to see that he was doing wellbut we never really collaborated nor wrote a paper together. Why we never did is a moot point.Curiously enough the situation suddenly changed when Frans was coming close to retirementand I was about to become an octogenarian. A few years ago Yves de Roo and I were workingon our book on the members of the Royal Academy. We then found that calculating their lifeexpectancy was both possible and illuminating in assessing their social position. Two or threeyears later it ocurred to me that one could possibly collect information on the birth and death15