Mobility and marriage: Preliminary findings from a new longitudinal dataset of Canadian women, 1871-1901

This article develops a methodology to create a longitudinal historical database of women by linking Ontario marriage records 1859-1938 to complete count Canadian census data between 1871 and 1921. We assess link quality using tests that provide insight into the trade-offs between sample size and allowing more potential false positives into the universe of accepted links. The results of these tests provide guidance on practical considerations in large-scale linkage projects with historical data. We use the linked data to construct the first historical estimates of female intergenerational mobility for Canada. The findings suggest that married women in Ontario had similar rates of intergenerational mobility as their male counterparts. We find little evidence that the inclusion of more likely false positive links leads to a bias in the estimation of intergenerational mobility.