For once, I'm here to ask a question rather than to answer / offer advice. :-)

I'm looking for statistics on female fertility rates on the United Kingdom since circa.1850 up to the current day for a friend working in the education sector.

Do any of you know of a website showing such data (the regular sources only go back to 1960 based on World Bank data) or of a journal or publication that shows such data going back to circa. 1850?

If the data is in the form of a journal paper (Wiley, Elsevier / Science Direct / Springer), could someone grab a copy for me and send me a PM so we can arrange for it to be e-mailed across? If the data is a direct or downloadable link, could you throw it up in reply to this message so she can access as quickly as possible?

She's on a tight deadline (tomorrow morning) so any help would be really appreciated!!!

Many thanks in advance,

Ian (Mackem_Beefy)

Try here (Data tables tab->vital statistics):
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/taxonomy/index.html?nscl=Births+and+Fertility

[quote]Quote From HazyJane:
Try here (Data tables tab->vital statistics):

Thanks Jane, however, in trying to help my friend I looked there, had a good hunt around, and I could only find data going back to 1960.

However, data on number of births going back to 1838 is available from here. It was a rush job and in the end I could only do a screen grab, but there was the potential to obtain population statistics and hence work out roughly the number of births per women over the required period. Setting up an account allows data download though there wasn't time to go that far.

It was actually an interesting exercise (being in the real world now, I do miss doing research work) and the above website could be used by researchers to obtain data since the mid-1800s for the UK. It could be a little more user friendly though with the data filters available and I think a redesign of the website would help.

So if anyone here can use this website, go for it.

Ian (Mackem_Beefy)

It was this document I was thinking of:

That had data going back to 1850 (on the 'live births') tab. I tried posting a direct link to the page hosting it, but every time I did my post came up blank - there was a hashtag in the URL and I think it borked the forums's code or something.

Not sure that's what your friend wanted though!

[Edited to add - I've just realised, you probably wanted births per woman, not births overall. So I've probably not actually directed you to the right thing, sorry!]