Abstract
The establishment of the Norwegian Historical Data Centre, the 1801 project at the University of Bergen and the data transcriptions and scanned versions of the sources in the National Archives made Norwegian microdata much more available. A more detailed description of the digital techniques applied to the wealth of censuses, church records and other types of nominative data from the 18th century onwards, will be presented in a separate article. Our main focus here is to summarize the impact of the research that has been produced based on the Norwegian historical microdata. These studies span a wide range of fields within social history and historical demography: Emigration, immigration, internal migration, fertility, nuptiality, family history and last but not least mortality studies with a priority given to infant mortality. A recent development is the building of a national historical population register covering the 19th and 20th centuries.
Highlights
This article sketches the background of the establishment of the Norwegian Historical Data Centre as part of University of Tromsø (UiT) The Arctic University of Norway
Contradicting McKeown's famous thesis on the relationship between nutrition and mortality, a study based on church records from 44 parishes linked to the 1801 census shows that Norway in the early 1800s had higher mortality among the upper social class compared to the lower social strata (Engelsen, 1983)
The microdata versions of Norwegian historical individual level sources have allowed a wide range of topics within population and social history to be studied more extensively and in more detail
Summary
This article sketches the background of the establishment of the Norwegian Historical Data Centre as part of UiT The Arctic University of Norway. This centre concentrates on data transcriptions and enhanced digital versions of the sources, which have often been developed in cooperation with other database vendors, especially the National Archives. We have researched most branches of social and population history, with priority given to studies of mortality, migration and family history. A mixture of methods has been used, for instance fertility has been studied nationally on the municipality level and parish-wise with microdata. While initially researchers used each source separately or with family reconstitution, they are being linked on the individual level with database techniques. The Norwegian Historical Population Register covering the period from 1800 onwards, is the fruition of this development
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