About usThe Department of Statistics of Padua, during the last decade, has developed the project CHILD (Collecting Hasburgical Information about Life and Death), collecting and recording nominative data on births and deaths in the age 0-4 in a large sample of parishes of the Central Veneto, using the Habsburg registers, compiled by the priests in care of souls – who worked as civil servants – between 1816 and 1870 (i.e. also for the first years of the new unitary state).
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who |
Gianpiero Dalla-Zuanna is professor of Demography at the University of Padova, Italy. He is the founder of the CHILD project. He has several publication on historical demography of Veneto and Italy.
Alessandra Minello has a PhD in Sociology and works as Research Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. She has been working on the CHILD project since 2008, organizing all the phases of the data collection and analysis. Leonardo Piccione received his PhD in Statistics at the University of Padova, with a thesis titled "Children Survival in Veneto 1815-70. From the Dark Age to the Dawn of Change". He is the main responsible for the harmonization of the dataset and massively contributed to the data analysis. |
the story of the project |
The CHILD project started in 2008 at the University of Padua in Italy. It initially began with the collection of data from few single parishes, done by student for their master thesis. Afterwards the project started to be more and more structured and involved more than fifty students engaged on an official stage. From initial isolated parishes we passed to groups of parishes located first in the province of Padova, and later in the diverse provinces of the region. Students were asked to report the records of births and deaths from pictures of the registers shot in the archives of the parishes. The process of data collection lasted for seven years, accompanied by the process of linkage between birth and death records. Afterwards there has been a long operation of data harmonization and a continuous strategy of improvement of data and research of new sources in order to add new official information to our dataset (such as, for example, the information about the daily temperature in the province of Padova).
The original aim of the project was to collect historical data useful in disentangling the main dynamics of the very high infant and child mortality characterizing the region of Veneto during the Austrian Empire (1816-66). Year after year this aim has evolved and we discovered new possible features to explore with the use of the CHILD dataset. |