Sant Feliu’s industrialisation may have altered individuals’ inter and intra -generational status according to general literature. In this regard, the modernization theory defends that changes in the occupational structure, the educational system’s and mass transportation’s implementation propitiated a turn from parental status adscription to meritocratic status achievement, increasing social mobility (Treiman, 1970). Nevertheless, other studies argue that higher-resource families and individuals retaining their influences and preponderant positions blocked social openness (Grusky, 1983). Furthermore, the industrialisation beginning rised economic inequality (Prados de la Escosura, 2008), presumably jeopardizing the individual’s social mobility, enforcing disparity across generations, hampering the intergenerational transmission of tangible and intangible assets (Van Leeuwen, 2009).

This paper aims at evaluating how intergenerational transmission shaped the individuals’ status attainment trajectories upon industrialisation; enquiring if the occupational structure transformation surpassed or not the familial influence on individual’s attainment. We reconstruct individuals’ occupational careers through ten preserved local censuses linked and crosschecked with individual fiscal data from the Barcelona Historical Marriage Database. We use multilevel modelling for familial effects persistence adding different measures of individual and household inequality in order to inquiry whether the interaction of contextual factors as disparity, changes in the occupational structure and the inherent inheritance legal system affected the familial dynamics of intergenerational transmission by social class, birth order, sex among others.