Leaving for Life: Using Online Crowd-Sourced Genealogies to Estimate the Migrant Mortality Advantage for the United Kingdom and Ireland During the 18th and 19th Centuries

In the United Kingdom, mortality decreased sharply and fertility remained stable until the mid-19th century before declining thereafter, resulting in a large population increase as the country moved through the second and third stages of the Demographic Transition (Friedlander and Okun 2022). [...] Despite the biases inherent in crowdsourced genealogies (Calderón Bernal, Alburez-Gutierrez, and Zagheni 2023; Stelter and Alburez-Gutierrez 2022), and the messiness of the raw data, we take steps, such as documenting and publishing the data preparation procedure, to ensure transparency and reliability of our data and results. [...] Comparing models A1 and B1 shows that the general migrant mortality advantage is similar to the mortality advantage among migrants to Australia and the United States, while migrants to Canada and New Zealand have a greater advantage, and migrants to South Africa have less of an advantage. [...] Discussion Using the case of emigration from the United Kingdom and Ireland to the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa during the 18th and 19th centuries, we test the migrant mortality advantage hypothesis in historical migration flows. [...] Like much of the literature (Feliciano 2020), we confirm the existence of a migrant mortality advantage for migrants from the United Kingdom and Ireland during the 18th and 19th centuries.