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BiB Data and Technical Report 2/2015 • 20.03.2015Historical Infant Mortality Rates Reconstructed by Using Church Records
The new Data and Technical Report by Michael Mühlichen and Rembrandt Scholz deals with historical church book data and their usability for demographic analyses using the example of infant mortality.
The contribution documents the data preparation of burial and baptismal registers of the church books of St. James in the Hanseatic city of Rostock, Germany, in order to analyse infant mortality in the 19th century. Besides describing the digitalised registries as well as the data quality and the construction of variables this paper presents a new classification of occupations that is also applicable to other historical data sets. In addition, the merging of the baptismal and burial data into an event history data set is outlined exemplarily for the time period of 1815 to 1829. Using this data basis, the development of infant and perinatal mortality is illustrated.
Mühlichen, Michael; Scholz, Rembrandt D. (2015): Dokumentation der Aufbereitung historischer Kirchenbuchdaten am Beispiel der Säuglingssterblichkeit in der Hansestadt Rostock. BiB Daten- und Methodenbericht 2/2015. Wiesbaden: Bundesinstitut für Bevölkerungsforschung