Contributions of family reconstitution studies to evolutionary reproductive ecology

The method of family reconstitution has many fathers. About 100 years ago, the first pioneers began to edit a unique depository of European history, n amely the church registers, with their data on vital events, which had been kept since early modern times. The aim was to compile the entries in a fam ily-centered way, making accessible a name-based (nominative) evaluation of the data. Since then, thousands of amateur researchers interested in eithe r genealogies or local history have conducted family reconstitutions. Weiss and Munchow(1) estimate that compilations of this kind have been made for about 5% to 10% of all German-speaking regions, frequently as unpublished c ard files or typed manuscripts. Other compilations have been printed as Ort ssippenbucher, or books of local genealogies, and thus are accessible to th e public. The personal, political, and scientific reasons for this work are extremely diverse and have their own history, which is not quite unproblem atic, especially in Germany.(1) That fact makes the uninhibited handling of this material more difficult.