Samenvatting

Notwithstanding the rise of life course criminology during the past decades, ­sources for longitudinal research remain scarce. A neglected source are communities with a bad reputation about which a wealth of archival data is available and this over long periods. In this study the authors investigated whether the so-called generation effect can be found in a disappeared community, the so-called ‘boskanters’, who lived between 1700 and 1914 in fairly primitive conditions in West Flanders (Belgium). From the literature the authors extracted six basic findings that they tested against demographic, genealogical and judicial data found in archives. Four of the six basic findings they did confirm. In the ‘boskanters’ community, too, serious delinquency runs in the family. Although a bad reputation tainted the entire community, criminal behavior was more concentrated in some family branches than in others. Intermarriages between criminal families help to explain this transmission and concentration. Correlations with seriousness of the offenses and the delinquent profile of the mother were not confirmed or only partially. The authors also did find that women less tied to criminal families had more chances to leave that community. Overall, this study shows that historical data on local communities might be useful in understanding how criminality persists from one generation to the next.