The Life Course of Seventeenth-Century Immigrants to Canada

de recherche en démographie historique of the Uni-versité de Montréal, is currently working on the historical demography of New France. Jacques Légaré, Professor of Demography, Uni-versité de Montréal, is Co-Director of the Pro-gramme de recherche en démographie historique. His principal research interests are in historical demography, life-course analysis, adultmortality and aging of populations. ABSTRACT: Using the register of the early French Canadian population, the "Pro-gramme de recherche en démographie historique "(Université de Montréal) has set out to identify the demographic parameters behind the individual life course of the cohorts of immigrants which founded the country. The authors selected for their study all the individuals born outside of Canada who settled in Canada before 1680. The analysis covers not only the timing of the marriages and births of children of the immigrants, from their arrival to their death, but also the intensity of the phenomena that character-ize their family life. The idea is to identify the proportion of individuals who lived through the main phases of the family life cycle (pre-parental, parental, post-parental) and to measure their timing. So as to avoid hiding the diversity of demographic behaviors behind broad averages, the study takes into account such basic variables as sex, length of life, number of marriages contracted, and number of children born. The demographic study of the family in history encompasses the broad areas of nuptiality, fertility, and mortality in past populations. Because of the overlapping at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016jfh.sagepub.comDownloaded from 202 of these phenomena, the analyst needs a concept permitting an integrated and comprehensive perspective on individual demographic behavior within the family with respect to the particular development of the family unit. The first empirical stud-ies of the historical demography of the family in the United States and Canada used primarily the concept of family life cycle which emphasizes the evolution of the family unit before, during, and after parenthood, with variables based on the couple rather than the individual (Glic