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Reconstruction of historical persons and family ties is the bread and butter of many researchers and genealogists. With the increasing digital availability of historical person records, the scope and depth of person reconstructions speaks to the imagination of researchers and genealogists. Yet, the lack of standardisation in the description of historical person data has hurt the interoperability and sustainability of both small and large databases. Persons in Context, or PiCo, presents a data model for historical person records within the Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF or Linked Data is specifically designed for clear, unambiguous information exchange between multiple parties over the internet. We show how reuse of existing ontologies and concentric description are the building blocks of a flexible, straightforward, and stringent data model that emphasises provenance.

This study is a reflection on the possibilities for cooperation between the fields of historical demography and genealogy. The first part of the paper summarizes the development of genealogy as a discipline in the Czech context. The paper goes on to recapitulate theoretical and practical examples of the involvement of genealogy in historical-demographic research in western historiography, especially in the North American context. The paper then discusses Czech development from the 1960s to the present. The paper compares the possibilities of both approaches by introducing the creation of a database using the classical application of the method of family reconstitution, discussing its pitfalls and the characteristics of such research in the Czech context. The paper then presents the possibilities of applying genealogical approaches and evaluations the situations in which applying such approaches is most appropriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LINKS stands for 'LINKing System for historical family reconstruction' and is a software system to link nominal data from the Dutch archives and ultimately reconstruct historical individuals and families. We present the background and philosophy of this matching system and explain its data structure and functioning. Currently the core data of the LINKS system consists of indexed civil certificates. These certificates are available from 1812 — the start of the Dutch Vital Registration — until the year they are confidential based on privacy laws. For more than 20 years, thousands of volunteers have been working to build this index, which contains not only the names of newborn, married and deceased persons, but also the names of their parents, places of birth, ages and sometimes their occupational titles. The software system LINKS includes the standardization of all input before linking, nominal record linkage procedures and identification of all unique persons involved in the system. All processes are repeatable and a strict distinction is maintained between source data, standardized, linked and enriched data and released data. Moreover, LINKS also informs archives about all kinds of errors and inconsistencies found during the cleaning and matching process. We will discuss two matching systems, the first is the original querying system that runs within a MySQL database environment and the second is a newly developed system, called burgerLinker, which is based on knowledge graphs and which is designed as a system that can be used independently from LINKS and is made available as open source software. Finally, we present the most important releases of LINKS data so far: two national releases that link birth and parental marriage certificates, creating families and pedigrees and an integrated dataset of persons, families and family trees in four provinces.

Since 1966, the Programme de recherche en démographie historique (PRDH) has worked to create comprehensive genealogical data of the Quebec population. The PRDH longitudinal database, the Registre de la population du Québec ancien (RPQA), draws upon the French Catholic parish registers of the St. Lawrence Valley as its main source material. This family reconstitution covers the French Catholic population of Quebec up to 1799, along with deaths after 1800 of persons born before 1750. Subsequent partnerships with l’Institut Généalogique Drouin, FamilySearch and Ancestry as well as collaboration on the 2011–2017 Infrastructure intégrée des microdonnées historiques de la population du Québec (1621–1965) (IMPQ) project enabled the PRDH to continue efforts to reconstitute the French Catholic population up to 1849. Despite these advances, pushing family reconstitution forward to the mid-19th century has forced the PRDH team to reckon with the increasingly mixed and geographically mobile Quebec population of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This article describes the content and design of the RPQA database, detailing the structure of the RPQA relational database and the breadth of variables available for data management and analysis. It then describes features of the IMPQ extension of family reconstitution from 1800 to 1849, including observational protocols necessary to use these data and consideration of data completeness after 1800. At the same time, the article addresses the fundamental question, "what is my population?" as part of a broader reflection upon the target population encompassed by these data.

LINKS stands for 'LINKing System for historical family reconstruction' and is a software system to link nominal data from the Dutch archives and ultimately reconstruct historical individuals and families. We present the background and philosophy of this matching system and explain its data structure and functioning. Currently the core data of the LINKS system consists of indexed civil certificates. These certificates are available from 1812 -- the start of the Dutch Vital Registration -- until the year they are confidential based on privacy laws. For more than 20 years, thousands of volunteers have been working to build this index, which contains not only the names of newborn, married and deceased persons, but also the names of their parents, places of birth, ages and sometimes their occupational titles. The software system LINKS includes the standardization of all input before linking, nominal record linkage procedures and identification of all unique persons involved in the system. All processes are repeatable and a strict distinction is maintained between source data, standardized, linked and enriched data and released data. Moreover, LINKS also informs archives about all kinds of errors and inconsistencies found during the cleaning and matching process. We will discuss two matching systems, the first is the original querying system that runs within a MySQL database environment and the second is a newly developed system, called burgerLinker, which is based on knowledge graphs and which is designed as a system that can be used independently from LINKS and is made available as open source software. Finally, we present the most important releases of LINKS data so far: two national releases that link birth and parental marriage certificates, creating families and pedigrees and an integrated dataset of persons, families and family trees in four provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1966, the Programme de recherche en démographie historique (PRDH) has worked to create comprehensive genealogical data of the Quebec population. The PRDH longitudinal database, the Registre de la population du Québec ancien (RPQA), draws upon the French Catholic parish registers of the St. Lawrence Valley as its main source material. This family reconstitution covers the French Catholic population of Quebec up to 1799, along with deaths after 1800 of persons born before 1750. Subsequent partnerships with l'Institut Généalogique Drouin, FamilySearch and Ancestry as well as collaboration on the 2011-2017 Infrastructure intégrée des Microdonnées historiques de la Population du Québec (1621-1965) (IMPQ) project enabled the PRDH to continue efforts to reconstitute the French Catholic population up to 1849. Despite these advances, pushing family reconstitution forward to the mid-19 century has forced the PRDH team to reckon with the increasingly mixed and geographically mobile Quebec population of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This article describes the content and design of the RPQA database, detailing the structure of the RPQA relational database and the breadth of variables available for data management and analysis. It then describes features of the IMPQ extension of family reconstitution from 1800 to 1849, including observational protocols necessary to use these data and consideration of data completeness after 1800. At the same time, the article addresses the fundamental question, "What is my population?" as part of a broader reflection upon the target population encompassed by these data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Issue of Genealogy examines the use of evidence, documentation, and methodology in family history and genealogical studies, and welcomes case studies that examine how to document individuals and relationships. A critical component of scholarly research focusing on the study of particular individuals or groups entails correctly identifying those individuals Historians, genealogists, historical demographers, and scholars in other disciplines sometimes undertake this sort of analysis. Often, research is uncomplicated if the research subject remained in a particular geographical area, or left a clear evidentiary trail, but what happens when historical documents do not clearly identify the research subject? Utilizing a case study approach, this essay employs four different research methods—the chronological study, family reconstitution, community study techniques, and the one-name study—to identify an individual whose correct historical identification was problematic. As such, it establishes a research strategy that can be employed in similar situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Antwerp COR*-database is a longitudinal micro-level database, which covers all entries from individuals whose last names started with the letters COR (and individuals who shared at some moment in time a household with a COR*-person) from the population registers and the vital registration of births, marriages and deaths for the 19th- and early-20th-century Antwerp district in Flanders, the northern Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. As such the database allows the reconstruction of historical life courses and families, and the analysis of key demographic characteristics and developments regarding marriage, fertility, migration, social mobility, health, mortality and longevity, as well as their interplay within and across households, families and generations. After a short description of the source material and the construction of the database, a review of the literature based on the database is presented in order to provide the reader with an encompassing overview of the research that has been carried out with this database and the knowledge and insights it has generated since its first release in 2010. The article ends with a discussion of potential pathways for future research, including new topics, and future extension of the database through citizen science projects.

For the Netherlands, a rich new data source has become available which contains indexed civil certificates for multiple generations of individuals: LINKS. The current version of the dataset contains information on 1.7 million demographic events for the province of Zeeland in the 19th and early 20th centuries and will be extended to other provinces in the Netherlands in the near future. To be able to study demographic behaviour, life courses and family relations need to be reconstructed from the civil certificates. This paper describes the steps that are taken to move from the LINKS database, which contains digitised birth, marriage, and death certificates and relational information between individuals on these certificates, to LINKS-gen, which contains over six hundred thousand life courses, family reconstructions for up to seven generations, and fertility, marital, mortality, and occupational status information, ready for analysis. We present procedures for variable construction and data cleaning. Furthermore, we give a short overview of the LINKS database, discuss quality checks, and give advice on selection of relevant cases necessary to move from LINKS to LINKS-gen. The paper is accompanied by R-scripts to convert and construct the datafiles.

'English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580–1837' was important both for its scope and its methodology. The volume was based on data from family reconstitutions of 26 parishes carefully selected to represent 250 years of English demographic history. These data remain relevant for new research questions, such as studying the intergenerational inheritance of fertility and mortality. To expand their availability the family reconstitutions have been translated into new formats: a relational database, the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) and an episode file for fertility analysis. This paper describes that process and examines the impact of methodological decisions on analysis of the data. Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen, and Schofield were sensitive to changes in the quality of the parish registers and cautiously applied the principles of family reconstitution developed by Louis Henry. We examine how these choices affect the measurement of fertility and biases that are introduced when important principles are ignored.

The method of family reconstitution has been considered inapplicable in Mexico, due to the multiple obstacles offered by the available documentary sources. However, this paper demonstrates that it is possible to apply this method. In Uruapan the reconstitution method was used between the late 17th century and much of the 18th century, which provided fundamental data on fecundity, age to marriage, family size, protogenic and intergenetic intervals. These data showed changes in the two registered quality groups: Indians and Rational People. Fecundity was analyzed in several components: age to marriage, years of marriage, evolution by age, years of marriage and procreated children. Fecundity was also analyzed during the study period to identify the effect of mortality crises and hollow generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Antwerp COR*-database is a longitudinal micro-level database, which covers all entries from individuals whose last names started with the letters COR (and individuals who shared at some moment in time a household with a COR*-person) from the population registers and the vital registration of births, marriages and deaths for the 19th- and early-20th-century Antwerp district in Flanders, the northern Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. As such the database allows the reconstruction of historical life courses and families, and the analysis of key demographic characteristics and developments regarding marriage, fertility, migration, social mobility, health, mortality and longevity, as well as their interplay within and across households, families and generations. After a short description of the source material and the construction of the database, a review of the literature based on the database is presented in order to provide the reader with an encompassing overview of the research that has been carried out with this database and the knowledge and insights it has generated since its first release in 2010. The article ends with a discussion of potential pathways for future research, including new topics, and future extension of the database through citizen science projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Scanian Economic-Demographic Database (SEDD) at the Centre for Economic Demography (CED), Lund University was built to answer questions derived from previous research using macro data from 1749 onwards. It includes longitudinal micro data for a regional sample of rural, semi-urban, and urban parishes in southern Sweden from 1646 to 1968 for approximately 175,000 individuals. In addition to the data on births, deaths, marriages, and occupations, it includes data on migration, household size, landholdings, taxation, and heights from the 1800s onwards and on income from 1865 onwards. After being linked from 1968 to 2015 to a range of national registers with detailed demographic and socioeconomic information, it includes 825,000 individuals. The richness and wide range of micro data have allowed researchers to follow individuals throughout their lives and across generations, covering extensive periods, and to make comparisons with results from macro data. This research has partly confirmed the established view on long-term changes in living standards and demographics in Sweden but has also brought into question some previously held truths.

The Scanian Economic-Demographic Database (SEDD) is a high-quality longitudinal data resource spanning the period 1646−1967. It covers all individuals born in or migrated to the city of Landskrona and five rural parishes in western Scania in southern Sweden. The entire population present in the area is fully covered after 1813. At the individual level, SEDD combines various demographic and socioeconomic records, including causes of death, place of birth and geographic data on the place of residence within a parish. At the family level, the data contain a combination of demographic records and information on occupation, landholding and income. The data for 1813−1967 was structured in the model of the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS). In addition to storing source data in the SEDD IDS tables, a wide range of individual- and context-level variables were constructed, which means that most types of analyses using SEDD can be conducted without the need of further elaboration of the data. This article discusses the source material, linkage methods, and structure of the database.

The BALSAC database, developed since 1971, contains data on the Quebec population from the beginnings of European settlement in the 17th century to the contemporary period. Today, BALSAC is a major research infrastructure used by researchers from Quebec and elsewhere, both in the social sciences and in the biomedical sciences. This paper presents the evolution and current state of the database and offers a perspective on forthcoming developments. BALSAC contains marriage certificates until 1965. Coverage is complete for Catholic records (80 to 100% of the population depending on the region and the period) and partial for the other denominations. Birth and death certificates from all Catholic parishes have been integrated for the period 1800–1849 and work in underway for 1850–1916. All the records entered in BALSAC are subject to a linkage process which, ultimately, allows the automatic reconstitution of genealogical links and family relationships. The basic principle has remained the same since the beginning, namely to match individuals based on the nominative information contained in the sources. The changes made in recent years and the resulting gains are mostly related to IT advances which now offer more flexibility and increased performance. Future perspectives rest on the diversification of the sources of population data entered or connected to the database and, as a corollary, by continuous optimization of data processing and linkage procedures. In the era of 'big data', BALSAC is gradually moving from a historical population database to a multifaceted infrastructure for interdisciplinary research on the Quebec population.

The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) provides a standard format for storing and sharing individual-level longitudinal life-course data (Alter and Mandemakers 2014; Alter, Mandemakers and Gutmann 2009). Once the data are in the IDS format, a standard set of programs can be used to extract data for analysis, facilitating the analysis of data across multiple databases. Currently, life-course databases store information in a variety of formats, and the process of translating data into IDS can be long and tedious. The IDS Transposer is a software tool that automates this process for source data in any format, allowing database administrators to specify how their datasets are to be represented in IDS. This article describes how the IDS Transposer works, first by going through an example step-bystep, and then by discussing each part of the process and potential options and exceptions in detail.

Historical demography is in transition from a data-poor to a data-rich environment. Previous generations relied on demographic models to squeeze as much information as possible from the small amounts of data available. In this new era of large data sets, researchers are creating both regional and international historical data sets of unprecedented size and depth. When examined closely, however, the regression methods used today make the same simplifying assumptions that generated the key advances of earlier generations. These new methods require demographic insight to inform analyses and enrich conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the reconstitution of professional trajectories. Topics discussed include self-portrait of his personal and family, his academic identity, his memorial model on his childhood experiences, his involvement in religious missions and ethnology of his religious works.

The paper describes the methods used to create a database to study the fall of fertility in Tasmania, a colony of Australia, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The database was initially created from digitised Tasmanian vital registration data using techniques of family reconstitution. However, because of the high mobility in Australia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, couples who moved out of the colony were tracked to other places, and births and deaths that took place in other Australian colonies and other countries, such as New Zealand and England, were included in the database. A wide variety of data sources were used for this task, most of which are available on the internet. The results presented in the paper show that including families who moved outside Tasmania, either temporarily or permanently, produced a database that was more representative of the study population and provided more accurate birth histories for couples who at first glance appeared to have spent their married lives within the colony.

In this article I attempt to utilise the vast efforts invested in a particularly Norwegian genre of local history, namely the farm and genealogy books (bygdebok , plural bygdebøker), to analyse aspects of migration, especially remigration from North America, in a micro-historical perspective. Such books, of which a rather large corpus exists, contain detailed longitudinal data on people and holdings within a limited region, usually a rural municipality or parish. Consulting two works from this bygdebok genre as primary sources, I identify and analyse those people who re-migrated to Norway after having been in North America prior to the commission of the 1910 census. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TheProgramme de recherche en démographie historique(Historical Demography Research Programme) (PRDH), founded in 1966 and based at the Département de Démographie of the Université de Montréal, has since its inception featured a central project, a family reconstitution database of Quebec’s Catholic population from 1621 to 1799 named theRegistre de la population du Québec ancien(Population Register of Historic Quebec) (RPQA). This article, which marks the fiftieth anniversary of the project, explores the development of the RPQA over the five decades in the context of similar international databases, explains the current state of the database as well as our record linkage methodology, describes an important collaboration now underway to build a larger Quebec historical data infrastructure, outlines new and renewed international collaborations, and summarizes research conducted using these data as well as future research possibilities. The particular geographic context, historical development and manageable colonial population size of Quebec favoured family reconstitution of the whole colony from the beginning of the project. Today, the RPQA comprises 438,193 individual biographies and 74,000 family files encompassing up to nine generations. To reconstitute families, we must identify and incorporate into the databasealldemographic events, including those whose existence can only be inferred through other sources. Future efforts to link nineteenth-century parish acts will need to deal with large case counts, mixed Catholic–Protestant marriages, and increased geographic and social mobility. The integration of complementary data will provide information on household co-residence, occupations, help track the destinies of mixed-religion persons and persons outside nuclear families and provide additional points of observation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The issue of the incomplete civil registration of Jewish marriages in areas of Poland occupied by Austria between 1772 and 1918 (the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria and the Grand Duchy of Cracow) demands closer analysis and clarification. Marriage records are very important in genealogy and historical demography; thus, irregularities in their registration rate can have a serious impact on the accuracy of data. Also, the legal status of a child (legitimate or illegitimate) can be an important factor that should not be neglected and need to be well understood. We collected data on the births and marriages of Jews from the city of Cracow and employed the procedure of family reconstitution to analyze families with parents who were officially married (legitimate), who had never married (illegitimate) and where marriage occurred years after the children were born (legitimized by subsequent marriage). This allowed the authors to study the dynamics of both the phenomenon of “ritual marriage” as such (when it appears, reaches its peak and vanishes) and of the families (how many and how often children are being born and when such marriage can ultimately become legitimized).

Child naming is an essential part of family life, because choosing a name is never a random decision. This practice can also be used to reconstitute the dynamics of family structures at a given time. For 19th century Transylvania, due to a historical population database under construction at Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj, such a reconstruction can be done for the first time. The present paper focuses on the practice of necronymic naming, as an indication of the importance of certain names in the family. For this analysis, two localities were selected, Ocna-Mureş and Războieni-Cetate. Although this research is still a work in progress, there is already plenty of data to support the hypothesis that child naming was used to strengthen family relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este artigo pretende revisitar alguns textos concernentes a um grupo de imigrantes de origem germânica e seus descendentes em Curitiba (Paraná), marcando as virtualidades da metodologia das reconstituições familiares. Seu conteúdo considera uma necessária atitude crítica que pautou o desenvolvimento desses trabalhos, tendo em vista principalmente as limitações da metodologia e das próprias fontes "paroquiais". Os primeiros resultados centraram-se em estudos de fecundidade de três coortes de casamentos (1866-1939) e, na continuidade, desenvolveram-se esforços no sentido de explorar a base de dados com objetivos que extrapolaram a demografia histórica stricto sensu. O quadro teórico da investigação está alicerçado numa história da construção de fronteiras étnicas, tendo como horizonte a imigração européia, a urbanização, questões político-ideológicas e a história de uma instituição religiosa.Este artículo pretende revisitar algunos textos concernientes a un grupo de inmigrantes de origen germánico y sus descendientes en Curitiba (Paraná), marcando las virtualidades de la metodología de las reconstituciones familiares. Su contenido considera una necesaria actitud crítica que pautó el desarrollo de esos trabajos, teniendo en consideración principalmente, las limitaciones de la metodología y de las propias fuentes "parroquiales". Los primeros resultados se centraran en estudios de fecundidad de tres cohortes de casamientos (1866-1939) y, en la continuidad, se desarrollaron esfuerzos en el sentido de explorar la base de datos con objetivos que extrapolaron la demografía histórica stricto sensu. El cuadro teórico de la investigación está basado en una historia de la construcción de fronteras étnicas, teniendo como horizonte la inmigración europea, la urbanización, aspectos político-ideológicos y la historia de una institución religiosa.This article re-examines texts about a group of immigrants of Germanic origin and their descendants in the city of Curitiba, State of Paraná, Brazil, and indicates potentialities of the family reconstitution methodology. In such methodology, the development of this type of research is placed under critical scrutiny, especially as regards to its limitations and the "parochial" sources themselves. The first results were focused on the fecundity studies of three marriage cohorts (1866-1939). Later, efforts were made to explore the database whose objectives had surpassed strictly historical demography. The theoretical framework of the research is based on a history of the construction of ethnic frontiers of European immigration to Brazil, urbanization, politico-ideological questions and the history of a religious institution.

Family reconstitutions have been undertaken only rarely in urban settings due to the high mobility of historical urban populations, in both life and death. Recently Gill Newton has outlined a methodology for the reconstitution of urban populations and we applied a modified version of this method to the large Westminster parish of St. Martin in the Fields between 1752 and 1812, a period that posed particular difficulties for family reconstitution because of the rapid lengthening of the interval between birth and baptism. The extraordinary richness of the records for St. Martin in the Fields made it possible to investigate burial and baptismal practices in great detail, and the extent and impact of residential mobility. We found that short-range, inter-parochial movement was so frequent that it was necessary to confine the reconstitution sample to windows in which families registered events at a single street address. Using birth interval analysis and the frequencies of twin births it was possible to demonstrate that the registration of birth events was fairly complete, but that many infant and child burials were missed. These missing burials probably resulted from the unreported export of corpses for burial in other parishes, a phenomenon for which we had considerable evidence. The limitations of family reconstitution in this highly mobile and heterogeneous urban population is discussed and we demonstrate some checks and corrections that can be used to improve the quality of such reconstitutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nuclear family is both crucible and product of capitalism and modernity, carried forth and modified across generations through ordinary communicative and other social practices. Focusing on postindustrial middle-class families, this review analyzes key discursive practices that promote 'the entrepreneurial child' who can display creative language and problem-solving skills requisite to enter the globalized knowledge class as adults. It also considers how the entrepreneurial thrust, including the democratization of the parent-child relationship and exercise of individual desire, complicates family cooperation. Family quality time, heightened child-centeredness, children's social involvement as parental endeavor, children's autonomy and freedom, and postindustrial intimacies organize how family members communicate from morning to night. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses debates around the changing nature of old age, using UK data on spending on dress and related aspects of appearance by older women to explore the potential role of consumption in the reconstitution of aged identities. Based on pseudo-cohort analysis of Family Expenditures Survey, it compares spending patterns on clothing, cosmetics and hairdressing, 1961–2011. It concludes that there is little evidence for the ‘baby boomers’ as a strategic or distinctive generation. There is evidence, however, for increased engagement by older women in aspects of appearance: shopping for clothes more frequently; more involved in the purchase of cosmetics; and women over 75 are now the most frequent attenders at hairdressers. The roots of these patterns, however, lie more in period than cohort effects, and in the role of producer-led developments such as mass cheap fashion and the development of anti-ageing products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]