The methods of multi-state demography can generally be applied to any process where transitions between states occur in dependence on age and one is ready to make the Markovian assumption that the transition probability depends only on the present state and on age. It turns out that this methodology fits quite well to the complex field of family demography and helps to avoid several pitfalls of other models such as the traditional family lifecycle approach. Aside from the analysis part the multi-state model can also be used to project the future distribution over states under different scenarios. This was done using IIASA's interactive DIALOG program for the case of Austria.