Press Report

The Dutch Organization of Sciences (NWO) granted a subsidy for the development of a large historical database, in which the life courses of the Dutch population over the last 150 years are reconstructed. By studying these data, new insights will be gained about the Dutch population in a period of fast industrialization and urbanization during the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century.

40,000 life courses
In the Life Courses in Context project 40,000 life courses will be collected of people born between 1863 and 1922. These individual life courses, which are reconstructed using archived population registers, will be completed with census data. The context of the life courses are derived from the population censuses in the period 1859 – 1947.

Organization
The project will be conducted by two institutes of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW): the International Institute for Social History (IISG) and the Netherlands Institute of Scientific Information Services (NIWI).

For more information:

• Historische Steekproef Nederlandse bevolking (HSN)
• Digitalisering van de Nederlandse historische volkstellingen
• Homepage van het Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis
• Homepage van het Nederlands instituut voor Wetenschappelijke Informatiediensten