The Promise of "Crowd-Sourced" Microdata for Studying the Lives of Dual Monarchy Emigrants, Immigrants, and Re-migrants

Historians seeking to study individual-level social phenomena about people in the Hapsburg Monarchy from 1867 through 1918 have been stymied by the lack of microdata census samples such as the IPUMS (Integrated Public Use Microdata Samples) for the United States.   The scattered surviving paper census files from the Dual Monarchy may mean that a Hapsburg PUMS project may never be feasible.  However, in recent years, the proliferation of genealogical websites offering digitized access to vital statistics records from the Dual Monarchy offers much promise.  Many of these websites depend on the labor of volunteer activists; collectively, these volunteers accomplish what no single scholar can do—translate, code, and produce tens of thousands of cases from birth, marriage, and death registers. The term for datasets resulting from the work of volunteer genealogists is “crowd-sourced” microdata.  The paper to be presented at the AHA in 2011 draws on four crowd-sourced vital statistics registers of Roman Catholics, Jews, Calvinists, and Greek Catholics who lived in a border province in the Hapsburg Empire.  The microdata allows for posing and answering questions about the timing of the fertility and mortality transitions as well as the extent of international migration among marriage partners.