Abstract
The article provides an overview of the historical organization of data collection on vital events and population in German territories during the pre-statistical era and briefly presents about a dozen related datasets. Data can be divided into the two categories of aggregate data on population and vital rates at the national, regional and community levels, and of nominative data at individual and household levels. The latter type of data is typically available only for individual communities or parishes. We illustrate the use of the datasets in published studies and point to directions for future research. The most important recent development concerns the increasing availability of indexed church records and online village genealogies, which offer a vast and little exploited potential for analysing the demographic patterns that prevailed prior to the onset of the demographic transition.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- The 25th Anniversary of the German Economic Review 2.0
- Special Issue Articles
- New Data Frontiers in German Economic History
- Demographic Data for the Pre-Statistical Age (Late Sixteenth Century to 1870)
- Measuring Historical Inequality in Germany
- Causes of German Inventiveness, 1815–1990. What We Can Learn from Patent Statistics
- The Universe of Germany’s Foreign Trade Prior to World War I
- Data Sources on the 19th and Early 20th Century German Capital Market: Challenges and Opportunities
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- The 25th Anniversary of the German Economic Review 2.0
- Special Issue Articles
- New Data Frontiers in German Economic History
- Demographic Data for the Pre-Statistical Age (Late Sixteenth Century to 1870)
- Measuring Historical Inequality in Germany
- Causes of German Inventiveness, 1815–1990. What We Can Learn from Patent Statistics
- The Universe of Germany’s Foreign Trade Prior to World War I
- Data Sources on the 19th and Early 20th Century German Capital Market: Challenges and Opportunities