Demography and society in historical Southeastern Europe

In many European countries historical census lists are used to study families, but these countries are generally situated in Western and Northern Europe. These census lists include information for each person, so that they can be analysed according to your own research questions. If you use existing statistics, you will be bound by the choice of questions of the people making these statistics. In Southeastern Europe this is still mostly missing, because the necessary databases of census lists have not been created yet. This project aims at creating the basis for such analyses, so that researchers can study differences between these countries and within these countries. Existing databases of census lists in Western and Northern Europe and of the 1918 Albanian population census will be used as examples for the new database. The first step will be a search for existing census lists up to the First World War in the archives of the countries of Southeastern Europe. We shall then make a choice of a representative sample of these census lists, so that we shall be able to analyse urban and rural families and families of different regions within these countries. The chosen persons and families will be entered into a database and important characteristics of them (sex, marital status, relationship, occupation, religion) will be coded. This project will create the largest European database of historical census lists outside of Western and Northern Europe. Research based on such an enhanced database will cast light on hitherto dark areas of Southeastern Europe in the fields of age at marriage, number of children, and household structures. The new data will be provided for free to the international scientific community so that additional possibilities for research will be created.

The project's aim was to increase our knowledge about the demography and social structures of historical Southeast Europe by analysing census manuscripts. In a first step such census manuscripts were searched in Southeast European archives. We were able to find manuscripts for most countries, but not for all of them. We designed samples so that they were as representative as possible. We then hired local historians to transcribe these sources, because they needed to work in the respective archives (mostly state archives in capital cities). The most important characteristics of the people (sex, marital status, relationship within the household, occupation, religion) were coded into a common scheme which enables researchers to perform comparative analyses in efficient ways. We were lucky to obtain additional data through our network of collaborators in Southeast Europe or by chance. This additional data was either available already as transcriptions, published books, or the existence of these sources was not known before. In such a way we are able to cover all countries of Southeast Europe with historical census microdata. All these data enabled us to build the largest database of historical census microdata outside of Western or Northern Europe. A large part of it is already available for interested researchers as an open access database containing more than 380,000 person records (https://gams.uni-graz.at/histdem) and additional data will be added on a regular basis. An analysis of fertility reveals that most regions had rather similar levels of fertility, but a considerable number of them had higher or lower fertility. Rural regions had generally higher fertility than cities, but there were some exceptions. The available data confirms generally the low ages at marriage for women, as women married on average at 19 years (Serbia) or 20 to 21 years (Croatia, Romania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Bulgaria). Slightly higher ages at marriage were found in Bessarabia in 1850 and Montenegro in 1879. Urban women marred about one year later than women in the countryside and literacy had an even stronger effect with a delay in marriage of about three years in Albania. Many rural couples started their married life as part of an existing household, most often in the household of a relative of the husband. Almost half of all ever-married women in the age range of 15 to 30 years lived in such households. Major exceptions to these patrilocal living arrangements were Romania and Bessarabia, while proportions exceeded 75 percent in Northern Albania. Co-residence changed over the life course as about half of all ever-married men at 20 years co-resided with another ever-married man. Later decreases were caused by mortality and household divisions, while increases in older age were due to marriages of sons or nephews.