The UC Croatia Project

History of the UC Croatia Project

E. A. Hammel

The UC Croatia Project was conceived by E. A. Hammel in the early 1980s with financial support at various points 1983-03 from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Slavic and East European Studies at U. C. Berkeley, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and logistical support throughout from the Department of Demography at U. C. Berkeley.1

At the most general level, this work was informed by the observation of C. Wright Mills that the true task of the social sciences was to show how the lives of little people were affected by the passage of great events. Appreciation of this dictum was tempered by the realization that its pursuit required rigorous comparative analysis of the kind pioneered (in Anthropology, this author’s primary discipline) by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Fred Eggan, Siegfried Nadel, Jack Goody, and others, and exemplified in the work of John and Beatrice Whiting, Laura Nader, A.K. Romney and others. It is fact modeled on the work of one of Hammel’s graduate students, Gunther Golde, who wrote a classic dissertation on two communities in southern Germany, in the same valley, on the same soil, one Catholic, the other Protestant. This work focuses on demographic behavior because nothing can be closer to human concern than birth, marriage, and death, and because those events can, in principle, be measured with greater precision than some other social events.

The project, thus initiated in this spirit of comparative social analysis, sought to explore the differences in demographic behavior between otherwise identical peasant populations living under civil vs. military serfdom before and and after emancipation, and between populations of different ethnicity but under the same feudal regime, on the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier c. 1700-1900. This region has seen many “great events” – the collapse of feudalism, the collapse of an agrarian economy, conflict between two empires, and the collapse of both. It can be said of it, as H. V. W. Termperley once remarked for Serbia, that it had had too much history.

Planning began with conversations between Hammel, Frank Dubinskas (an anthropology doctoral student at Stanford who had worked in the region under Hammel's supervision), and Dr. Olga Supek (then of the Institute for Ethnology and Folklore, Zagreb). In 1983 Hammel began work in archives in Vienna, Zagreb, and Budapest. This work was facilitated by the advice and cooperation of Michael Mitterauer, Rainer Münz, Wolfgang Lutz, Joseph Eimer, Rudolph Andorka, and Tamas Farago in Austria and Hungary. The majority of work unfolded in Zagreb, with the active assistance of the staff of the State Archive of Croatia, particularly Dr. Josip Kolanović (later Director of the Archive) and the encouragment of Vladimir Stipetić, Alica Wertheimer-Baletić, and Jakov Gelo of the Faculty of Economics. Most particularly it was assisted by staff and logistical support from the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore, under the directorship of Dr. Dunja Rihtman-Augustin, especially by Jasna Čapo (who later took her doctorate in Demography at Berkeley).  The basic collection of parish data took a number of years of effort, supervised by Čapo in Zagreb. Initial efforts at family reconstitution were undertaken in Fortran by Ruth Deuel, with assistance from Čapo, later modified by Marcia Feitel. Final efforts at reconstitution, using the Perl language, were begun by Hammel with the advice of Carl Mason about 1996. The final reconstitution code was written and executed by Aaron Gullickson.

This kind of work, called family reconstitution from the process of connecting parish records of baptism, marriage, and burial to create personal histories, was once the province of genealogists. It seeks to turn such linked-event histories into databases for technical analysis. How historical demographers actually carry out such linkage procedures is usually only described in principle, and seldom in detail. Indeed, family reconstitution is a little like sausage, of which it has been said, if you like sausage, it is best not to inquire how it is made. We try here to be as explicit as possible about the procedures that led to the linked datasets that underlie analyses we have undertaken.

The final version of this website will contain all of the originally transcribed data, in standardized format, the linked reconstitution data, and the Perl code used in the linkages. Readers of these materials should note that the original manuscript data and their unmodified transcription are the property of the state of Croatia, or the State Archive of Croatia, or the Bishopric of Zagreb.2 The processed data are the property of the Regents of the University of California and are in the public domain for legally permissible noncommercial purposes only. Genealogists should note that nominal data linkages are not free of error.

That said, the scholarly community is encouraged to make use of these data.

The following links provide access to the documents:

• Map of Slavonia and the study region
• Data
• Basic Data The basic data (records of baptisms, marriages, and burials) from 7 parishes of central Slavonia  c. 1700-1900, uniformly formatted to overcome changes in the way records were entered in  different periods in different parishes. These are the *.uni files. There is a separate file for each parish and each type of record, e.g. baptisms in parish X. Note that our filenames refer to these events as “birth”, “marriage” and “death”, and there may be some disparity in date between a birth and the baptism of a child, or a death and the burial of the decedent. Ethnographic and historical information, however, suggest that baptisms were usually performed by the midwife, who reported the information to the recording priest. Indeed, the “training” of midwives mentioned in the historical sources was apparently largely related to how to baptize an infant properly. We do not know if burials were delayed in winter if the ground was frozen or for how long. The recording of marriages was presumably coterminous with the event; however, some ethnographic data suggest that cohabitation may have preceded marriage occasionally as a kind of “trial marriage” to test compatibility and fertility.
• The same data reduced to fields thought essential to nominal record linkage. For example, the name of the officiating priest is not included. Names are tokenized to standardize spelling. This tokenization was done not through formal “soundex” transformations but by project personnel conversant in Croatian, German, and Latin, combing through the data. Both the tokenized and original untokenized last names are given in the these files. The data are in three files, one for each type of event, but data from all parishes are included. For example, there is one file for all burials instead of seven. These are the *.w files. Most researchers will use these files.
• Linked data, based on the latest iteration of our nominal linkage procedures.
• Codes and Procedures
• Perl scripts, R scripts, and other files used in nominal data linkage (by Aaron Gullickson). See the README file first.
• Publications relevant to and arising from these data and procedures. Some are given as references, others to downloadable pdf files.
  
  

Note 1: None of the agencies or institutions named are responsible for errors in these data.
Note 2: Parish records up to about 1848 were copied from the State Archive of Croatia. Parish records after that date were collected from police stations in Slavonia. Some ancillary information was obtained from the archives of the Bishopric of Zagreb. Information on libri status animarum from the parish of Cernik were copied from the books in the Monastery of Cernik.


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