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Norge har et sentralt landsdekkende folkeregister som ble startet opp i 1964, og for mange personer inneholder data som går lenger tilbake. For tida bygger vi et Historisk befolkningsregister (HBR) tilbake til 1801. Målet er å konstruere en nasjonal database for også å håndtere innenlandsk migrasjon, som er dårlig dekket i de nominative kildene til langt ut på 1900-tallet. HBR bygger primært på folketellingene og kirkebøkene i perioden, siden det har vært for arbeidskrevende å utnytte de kommunale folkeregistrene som ble ført for et økende antall steder til de ble landsdekkende etter krigen. For den åpne perioden fram til 1920-tallet er HBR tilgjengelig via tre nettbaserte grensesnitt. For det ene, par av lenkede folketellinger, hvor data om samme person på to ulike tidspunkt er sammenstilt, for det andre «Tidslinjer», der innførsler fra flere folketellinger og kirkebøker er lenket sammen, og histreg.no, der brukerne selv kan bidra i lenkingen basert på alle kildene i Digitalarkivet. Disse er godt egnet for genealogi og lokalhistoriske studier. HBR gjøres òg tilgjengelig som datafiler gjennom Intermediate Data Structure (IDS), som gir datagrunnlag for kvantitative studier. Denne artikkelen vil beskrive hovedpunkter i disse fire grensesnittene til det historiske befolkningsregistret, som er åpne for alle typer brukere. Norway has a nationwide Central Population Register that was started in 1964, and which for many persons contains data extending backwards in time. Currently, we are building a Historical Population Register (HPR) back to 1801. The goal is to construct a national database which also handles domestic migration, an aspect poorly covered in the nominative sources well into the 20th century. We base the HPR primarily on the censuses and church books during the period, since it has been too laborious to utilize the municipal population registers that were kept for an increasing number of municipalities until they became nationwide after World War II. This article presents the user interfaces to the Historical Population Register and how they are used for quantitative and qualitative purposes.

Max Weber claims in his well-known book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, that the emergence of capitalism had its roots in the Protestant work ethic. Becker and Woessmann’s seminal 2009 paper finds that the more likely relationship between Protestantism and economic prosperity runs via literacy. They claim that Protestants unintendedly acquired literacy skills that functioned as human capital in the economic sphere by adhering Luther’s call to learn to read the Bible on their own. In this paper, we investigate at individual level to what extent one by reading Holy scripts acquired functional literacy skills. By using unique individual-level data from nineteenth-century Protestant Norway, we are able to identify offsprings of families known to be intensive readers of religious texts. Our results indicate that the effect of religious reading on functional literacy was restricted: religious reading gave better skills to read easily understood texts, but did not give better skills to read more advanced texts. Our results give more nuances in our understanding of what role pre-modern Nordic religious reading played in economic progress in Lutheran Nordic countries.

The establishment of the Norwegian Historical Data Centre, the 1801 project at the University of Bergen and the data transcriptions and scanned versions of the sources in the National Archives made Norwegian microdata much more available. A more detailed description of the digital techniques applied to the wealth of censuses, church records and other types of nominative data from the 18th century onwards, will be presented in a separate article. Our main focus here is to summarize the impact of the research that has been produced based on the Norwegian historical microdata. These studies span a wide range of fields within social history and historical demography: Emigration, immigration, internal migration, fertility, nuptiality, family history and last but not least mortality studies with a priority given to infant mortality. A recent development is the building of a national historical population register covering the 19th and 20th centuries.

Summary This article explores sex and gender patterns in mortality, based on individual-level causes of death (CODs) in two urban communities, obtained from civil and parish registers. By analysing CODs for the period 1880–1910 for Roosendaal (Netherlands) and Trondheim (Norway) we investigate how notions of sex and gender were reflected in cause-specific mortality rates for adults and in the registration of CODs by local authorities. Our findings show (i) excess male mortality among age group 15–70, (ii) airborne infectious diseases were responsible for most deaths in both cities, but did not show a distinct gender pattern, (iii) TB appeared to be more location-specific than gender-specific. However, the level of variation and specification in TB COD terms was higher among women in both locations.

Denne artikkelen er en nærstudie av tuberkulosedødelighet i Tromsø by i en periode med sterk befolkningsvekst og tettere bosetting. Fra og med 1878 har vi tilgang på en tilnærmet fullstendig registrering av individuelle dødsårsaker i begravelsesprotokollene for Tromsø, og sammenstilt med folketellingene av 1875, 1885, 1900, 1910 og 1920 har vi rekonstruert Tromsøs befolkning etter kjønn og alder for å kunne beregne dødelighetsrater basert på de som til enhver tid var under risiko for å dø i perioden 1878 til 1920. Våre funn viser at kvinner i aldersgruppen 15 til 49 år hadde en høyere dødelighet av tuberkulose, sammenliknet med menn, spesielt i tiårene før århundreskiftet. Hva som forårsaket disse tuberkulosedødsfallene er komplekst, men vi søker her å løfte frem tre forhold som kan bidra til en økt forståelse av både alder- og kjønnsforskjellene, nemlig mangelen på pasteurisering av melk, arvet motstandsdyktighet og migrasjon.

We studied whether in utero exposure to economic hardship during a grandmother’s pregnancy has a transgenerational effect on her grandchildren's health condition. We used an individual-level three-generation data set covering people born between 1734 and 1840 in the municipality of Rendalen in Norway. We found a culling effect in which grandchildren whose grandmothers gave birth in years of economic hardship lived approximately ten years longer than grandchildren whose mothers were born in years of economic well-being. This impact was only observed among the grandmothers who belong to the lowest social classes. Our results also showed that in higher social classes, economic hardship during a grandmother’s pregnancy deteriorated her grandchildren’s health by “scarring” the mother’s health.

Source at http://hdl.handle.net/10622/23526343-2018-00014?locatt=view:master. It has previously been shown that infant mortality clusters in a subset of families, a phenomenon which was observed in historical populations as well as contemporary developing countries. A transmission of death clustering across generations has also been shown in Belgium, but it is unknown whether such effects are specific to the studied context or are also found in other areas. The current article introduces a special issue devoted to analysing intergenerational transmissions of infant mortality across the maternal line in Belgium, the Netherlands, northern and southern Sweden, and Norway. Taking advantage of the Intermediate Data Structure (IDS), the five empirical studies created datasets for analysis and ran statistical models using exactly the same programs, which are also published within the special issue. These works are the first set of studies using the IDS on several databases for comparative purposes. Consistent results across the studied contexts were shown: transfers of infant mortality across the maternal line were seen in all five areas. In addition, the works have shown that there are large advantages of adopting the IDS for historical demographic research. The structure has in fact allowed researchers to conduct studies which were fully comparable, transparent and replicable.

This article researches living arrangements longitudinally on the basis of census materials and church records from around 1900 in a Norwegian parish. We are interested in patterns of obligations and expectations between generations, and to what extent these were related to rules of inheritance practices. We hypothesize that the parity of children co-residing with elderly fathers in the census reflects expectations and attitudes towards filial responsibility. Based on linking the census records of elderly fathers to their fertility history in the church records, the article indicates that traditions in the circumpolar north differed from the usual practice of primogeniture among countries in the Germanic cultural area, including most of Norway. Irrespective of the father’s marital status, the majority of children living with their elderly fathers were sons. One important reason for this is the masculine character of the fisheries, where the transfer of knowledge from father to son was crucial for successf...

Using marriage banns registers from the Amsterdam City Archives, this study identifies the demographic and spatial behaviour of Norwegian female immigrants to Amsterdam, a city that witnessed rapid economic and population growth during the seventeenth century. The article approaches the topic by making: (1) an ethnic distinction between mixed Norwegian/non-Norwegian unions and homogeneous all-Norwegian unions, as well as (2) a distinction by husband's occupation in these unions, whether at sea or on land. Like all women in Amsterdam, Norwegian women experienced a general pressure in the marriage market around 1675, though a somewhat lower pressure for homogeneous unions with sailors. Occupation may explain the residential pattern, suggesting that work defined neighbourhoods more than ethnicity.

The Historical Population Register (HPR) of Norway aims to cover the country’s population between 1800 and 1964 when the current Central Population Register (CPR) takes over. This may be feasible due to relatively complete church and other vital registers filling the gaps between the decennial censuses-In 1801 and from 1865 these censuses were nominative. Because of legal reasons with respect to privacy, a restricted access database will be constructed for the period ca. 1920 until 1964. We expect, however, that the software we have developed for automating record linkage in the open period until 1920 will also be applicable in the later period. This chapter focuses on the record linkage between the censuses and the church registers for the period 1800 until around 1920. We give special attention to database structure, the identification of individuals and challenges concerning record linkage. The potentially rich Nordic source material will become optimally accessible once the nominal records are linked in order to describe persons, families and places longitudinally with permanent ids for all persons and source entries. This has required the development of new linkage techniques combining both automatic and manual methods, which have already identified more than a million persons in two or more sources. Local databases show that we may expect linkage rates between two-thirds and 90 % for different periods and parts of the country. From an international perspective, there are no comparable open HPRs with the same countrywide coverage built by linking multiple source types. Thus, the national population registry of Norway will become a unique historical source for the last two centuries, to be used in many different multi-disciplinary research projects. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.