This volume is an important study in demographic history. It draws on the individual returns from the 1891, 1901 and 1911 censuses of England and Wales, to which Garrett, Reid, Schurer and Szreter were permitted access ahead of scheduled release dates. Using the responses of the inhabitants of thirteen communities to the special questions included in the 1911 'fertility' census, they consider the interactions between the social, economic and physical environments in which people lived and their family-building experience and behaviour. Techniques and approaches based in demography, history and geography enable the authors to re-examine the declines in infant mortality and marital fertility which occurred at the turn of the twentieth century. Comparisons are drawn within and between white-collar, agricultural and industrial communities, and the analyses, conducted at both local and national level, lead to conclusions which challenge both contemporary and current orthodoxies.

The Conference on Demography of Incomplete Data: Own Children Methodology, Past and Present was organized by the Northeast Asia Economic Forum (NEAEF) in collaboration with the East-West Center and the College of Social Sciences of the University of Hawai‘i at M�noa, in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, on 2 July 2018, in view of continuing and expanding activities in the use of the methodology in new areas such as the European countries as well as in historical demography. The own-children methodology for estimating fertility has a long history going back to the 1960s and has been applied in an increasing number of countries and areas globally for which the census and survey data are available. In assessing the methodological paper "The Own-Children Approach to Fertility Estimation: An Elaboration," by Lee-Jay Cho, the United Nations Manual X: Indirect Techniques for Demographic Estimation stated that "probably the greatest innovation introduced by the proponents of the own-children method is the exploitation of seldom-used census information for fertility estimation purposes." In the course of the numerous applications beginning with the United States for the countries of East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific, such as Korea, Japan, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia, the own-children method was extended, improved, and elaborated by demographers at the East-West Population Institute (EWPI), and in 1987 resulted in the publication of a long-enduring volume The Own-Children Method of Fertility Estimation by Lee-Jay Cho, Robert Retherford, and Minja Choe. Subsequent methodological extensions and refinements were made possible with Norman Luther and others. The Conference highlighted historical background, expanding applications, and most recent developments in the own-children methodology, and at the same time celebrated the success and sustainability of the methodology achieved by the contributions of those dedicated demographers cited in this proceedings volume.

This volume is an important study in demographic history. Garrett, Reid, SchÜrer and Szreter use techniques and approaches drawn from demography, history and geography to explore the conditions under which declines in both infant mortality and fertility within marriage occurred in England and Wales between 1891 and 1911. Extensive use is made of previously unavailable census data drawn from thirteen communities in England and Wales, particularly those from the 1911 "fertility" census. The book's sometimes surprising conclusions will be of interest to all historians of Britain and of demography.