Volkmar Weiss

Local Population Studies in Central Europe Volkmar Weiss

A local family heritage book is a historical secondary source, where not only the essential family (father and mother and their children) are listed together (or, information written on an index-card or beside a text, supported by computer), but also is created as a connection for the family to their genealogy. This means there is a link from father and mother to their respective parents and a link from the children to their marriage, provided that these facts were contained in the primary sources. The primary sources, which are the basis for the work on a local family heritage book, normally are the parish-register, but also all other personal and historical primary sources of religious or secular origin. This information can be used for creating a local family heritage book, just as published secondary sources such as local family heritage books of neighboring villages. The method of putting together the persons extracted from a parish-register with the family to which they belong, the family reconstitution or Henry Method, was published in the nineteen fifties in France and has undoubtedly influenced the historical demography and the social history of the world. But the international science failed to notice that in the German-speaking countries such products had appeared several decades before and in large numbers. Already in the 16th Century in some villages there existed a soul register, which were a temporal cross-section of the population in a fixed year. This remained also in some districts (example: in upper Austria). Otherwise they passed over to an extrapolated family register. In 1807 the lead of a family register was prescribed by law for every village of Württemberg. Since 1920 Konrad Brandner tried to register the descent of the whole population of the Styria in a Folk genealogy. During the period of National Socialism the Reich Nutrition Office [Reichsnährstand] had the ambition, within the scope of his Blood and Ground-policy, to publish a Village kinship book for each village and organized the parish-register indexing. Without reference to this political target, since the nineteen fifties, local family kinship books were worked out and published by the regional researcher in a permanently growing number. This monograph contains a survey of questions and methods on the scientific evaluation of local family kinship books, along with an exhausting bibliography. This survey is arranged in its content on the following topics: The pioneers of evaluation; the anthropologist Walter Scheidt and his school; Medical problems and endogamy; The Innsbrucker school; The habits of inheritance; Ecological village studies; Social differences of the number of children; Migration and urbanization; Marriageable age; The French school; Social mobility; Household structures; Family sociology; Microhistory; Confessional differences; Sociobiology; Preparations for representative studies on the basis of 2,000 already-existing local family kinship books of German-speaking countries.