Anne McCants
counties that constitute the Tua Valley beginning in 1886 and continuing to 2012 (with the exception of the years 1897-1912 and 1926-28 for which the data is not complete). What is immediately apparent is that with the notable exception the number of deaths in every year up to 1989, after which they drop below that number not to recover to the present day. Indeed, by the start of the decade of the 1970s the drop in the total number of births accelerated such that its rate of decline outpaced the much more steady rate of decline in the number of deaths in the Valley. It is only in this very late period (by Western European standards) that the demographic transition can be said to have come to this particularly of natural increase after 1970 can be seen easily in Graph 3, which charts the same data as a differential between births and deaths.4 There are several interesting things one might notice about this data, even in its current crude form as simply absolute numbers of demographic events. To ately after the construction of the railroad, 1886-96, suggests that perhaps both births and deaths fell in this period of initial connection with the wider world of northern Portugal, and perhaps beyond. It is a tempting conclusion to draw given the theory discussed above. However, the absence of records prior to the building of the railroad, the cessation of records for sixteen years less than a decade after it was completed, and the return of the level of births and deaths to the approximate level around 1890 when the series resumes in 1913, all conspire against drawing any real conclusions about the immediate impact of the construction of the line on family formation strategies or on the economic opportunities for household formation in the Valley. The data is simply too fragmented, (and moreover at precisely the wrong moments) to offer us a reliable guide to changes that may have been set in motion by the sudden expansion in 1887 of agricultural export capacity or the infusion of new ideas from the outside world. Another striking feature of this initial review of the parish records of the Tua Valley is the conformity it reveals to the standard features of the demographic transition, despite its very late arrival. Following the cessation of hostilities at the number of deaths began a slow, but steady, decline across all of the twentieth century. A decline in births did not immediately follow, however, and so for all of the decades of the twenties through the sixties (with a peak in 1952), there were high rates of natural increase. Only after 1970 did the number of births be4
Ideally, the absolute number of births and deaths should be converted into fertility and mortality rates There is (more or less) decadal census data for the counties of the Valley after 1878 but we have not as yet developed the estimates of annual population numbers needed to calculate rates. This work is in progress and will be forthcoming in a subsequent presentation of this data.
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