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

Since 1995 numerous volunteers have been working to build an index of all 19 th and early20 th century civil certificates of the Netherlands, not only containing the names of all born,deceased and married persons, but also the names of their parents, places of birth, ages andpartly their occupational titles. In this so-called GENLIAS dataset, especially the marriagecertificates have been indexed, resulting in about 3,500,000 indexed certificates from almostall of the Netherlands for the period 1812-1932.To use these data for scientific research the LINKS project has been initiated by the HSN.LINKS reconstructs all 19 th and early 20 th century families in the Netherlands. Main goalsof LINKS are the construction of pedigrees (linking marriages certificates of children andparents) and families (adding births and deaths to marriage certificates). LINKS is a follow-upof earlier work with the GENLIAS dataset, especially for the provinces of Zeeland, Overijsseland Gelderland which started around 2006. Actually, in 1993, Frans and I went to Zeeland todiscuss the construction of a Zeeland index of death certificates, which would have becomepart of the so-called AKON index (Algemene Klapper Overlijdensakten Nederland). TheZeeland index was realized but AKON was overtaken by GENLIAS which started in 1995and developed rapidly since then.The HSN was and is a mix of all kinds of projects directed at economic, social and demographichistory based on micro data. The total output of HSN of the last twenty years amounts to270 publications and 473 presentations. What might that have been without Frans? Perhapsnothing at all, one, given his importance for the HSN as a whole. There are 42 publications inwhich Frans was involved. Most of them focused on mortality with 24 publications, marriagecounted 9 publications, other subjects were fertility and divorce. The number of presentationswith Frans is 77 including the one in which Frans and I presented the first results of theHSN (at the Historical Demographical Conference in Montréal in 1992). We still workedwith overhead sheets and I remember that Frans came to Schiphol to present me the lastversions just before my departure to Montréal! The last ten years Frans is speeding up, givingpresentations with HSN data at an average of ten per year. And, again, almost all of thesepresentations are co-productions where Frans, as always, takes a great part of the work.The presentations of Frans are a goldmine for future work. I only have to remember thestill unpublished but quite brilliant presentation about remarriages at the SHAA Chicago2007 (Who did and who did not? Remarriage in the Netherlands during the 19 th and early20 th century). Figure 2 shows significant differences in the chance of remarrying betweenbridegrooms from different social backgrounds that are still waiting to be further analyzed,especially the question why the semi-skilled males were lagging behind in remarrying. Didthey have better health prospects? Did they have smaller families? Did they have lowerincomes? Were these workers not attractive partners for women looking for a partner? Wefound that age and marital status of the bride were very important to explain a second marriage,but why are these effects cheerfully interacting with social and provincial background? Andof course the model needs to be improved as well, but that goes too far for this contribution.Anyway, with the new LINKS dataset the whole country could be covered, including effectsof the first marriages as well.47