POPULATION OF THE FRENCH OVERSEAS TERRITORIES IN THE PACIFIC, PAST, PRESENT AND PROJECTED

Modern historical demography using family and genealogy reconstructions has rarely been applied to Oceanian populations.1The main reason for this is that baptism registers are incomplete. At the time of expanding Christianity, the population registered by the missionaries was increasing. Moreover, it was affected by many biases. Young people converted in order to participate in the new way of life and the new economy, but old people rarely changed their religion and they lived and died in the animism of their ancestors. This bias in age structure of the Christian population may be important until all the population was converted. Another bias occurs because not all baptised persons were newly born children, but sometimes older children or adults, and this was not always noted by the missionary. Death registration often began later than baptism registration and is usually less complete (some deaths are registered as baptism ‘in articulo mortis’). © 1991, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All rights reserved.