Linking Scottish vital event records using family groups

Abstract

The reconstitution of populations through linkage of historical records is a powerful approach to generate longitudinal historical microdata resources of interest to researchers in various fields. Here we consider automated linking of the vital events recorded in the civil registers of birth, death and marriage compiled in Scotland, to bring together the various records associated with the demographic events in the life course of each individual in the population. From the histories, the genealogical structure of the population can then be built up. Rather than apply standard linkage techniques to link the individuals on the available certificates, we explore an alternative approach, inspired by the family reconstitution techniques adopted by historical demographers, in which the births of siblings are first linked to form family groups, after which intergenerational links between families can be established. We report a small-scale evaluation of this approach, using two district-level data sets from Scotland in the late nineteenth century, for which sibling links have already been created by demographers. We show that quality measures of up to 83% can be achieved on these data sets (using F-Measure, a combination of precision and recall). In the future, we intend to compare the results with a standard linkage approach and to investigate how these various methods may be used in a project which aims to link the entire Scottish population from 1856 to 1973.     

Geographical propinquity among pre-famine Catholic Irish settlers in Upper Canada

Recent studies of frontier settlement in North America have suggested the existence of a greater complexity of society and locality than once visualized. The settlement of propinquitous groups of people with similar origins was a common feature of nineteenth-century America. The territorial identity of these groups may have both reflected and reinforced their cultural distinctiveness. This study examines the geographical propinquity of the Catholic Irish in the Robinson emigration of 1825 to Upper Canada (early Ontario). The object is to demonstrate the varying pattern of propinquity spatially and to associate the pattern with characteristics of social propinquity. The existence of social institutions, particularly the nuclear family and the parish, or antecedent community, within the Irish group appears to have been an important influence on the local geographical pattern of initial settlement.