The effects of family and location on wealth: A longitudinal study of the US North, 1850–1870

BACKGROUNDFamily effects can be confounded with spatial effects, since family members live near each other. OBJECTIVEOur aim is to find out whether a father's wealth was related to his son's wealth when spatial effects are included in the model.The data is from the United States from 1850 to 1870.Since the data comes from genealogies we are also able to test for deeper family effects lasting several generations. METHODSThis article uses Bayesian longitudinal methods that incorporate spatial effects.The data comes from the genealogies of nine New England families that have been linked to the US censuses of 1850, 1860, and 1870, which had information on real property, the dependent variable in our analysis. RESULTSNo relationship was found between the wealth of the father and his sons in our data, nor were the deeper family effects significant.Spatial effects were also not significant.