The family as a source of knowledge about historical Poznań, 1830-1930
Project summary
The proposed project has three objectives. The first is to investigate the impact of the social, economic, and psychological well-being of the family on the biological and social condition of the offspring. The project raises questions about the role of social and religious inequalities, the impact of adverse environmental conditions (wars, hunger, uprisings, religious riots, strikes, epidemics) on sex ratio at birth, the impact of stress caused by the loss of a parent (s) on the offspring’s decisions regarding the moment of getting married and starting a family. The project also poses the question of whether the number and sex of offspring influenced parental life span, especially the mother’s.
The goal of the project will be achieved by focusing on a Poznań family in 1830-1930. Individual records of births, marriages and deaths gathered from parish books
of Catholic and Protestant parishes from Poznań will be used for the implementation of this project. The books are deposited in the State Archives in Poznań. On their basis, some histories of Poznań families will be reconstructed, which will be used to verify the research hypotheses. In the period proposed for the research, a Poznań family was diverse in terms of religion, nationality, social and economic development, and was embedded in the rich context of political, economic, and social changes that took place in Poznań.
The project is characterized by an innovative interdisciplinary approach to family research. It combines methodologies derived from natural sciences and humanities. In its innovative approach, it offers a deep insight into the relationship between parents and offspring against the background of socio-economic inequalities in
a multicultural urban agglomeration. Thanks to the multifaceted research of the family, the existing knowledge will be deepened and the analysis of intra-family relations between parents and offspring as well as their social and biological consequences will be carried out, which will be a reference study for social and economic historians and family researchers, demographers, sociologists, economists, and biologists. The project outcomes will be a key element in future comparative studies covering Central and Eastern Europe.
The second goal of the project is to create a database of Poznań residents, consisting of individual information about all components of the natural movement: marriages, births, and deaths from the 1830s to the 1930s.The database for Poznań will be built according to international standards and linked to the already existing similar databases for Europe. In this way, the population of Poznań will be included in the research on populations of historical Europe. High international standards, according to which the database will be built, will enable very precise comparative research of the Poznań family by a wide group of interdisciplinary researchers. The database will meet the needs and expectations of not only scientists (researchers and scholars), but also non-specialists interested in genealogical quest – a special internet application will allow the interested parties to find information about their ancestors.
As part of the project, the digitization of birth, marriage, and death records of the Civil Registry Office in Poznań, district 1, for 1874-1930, deposited in the State Archives of the city of Poznań, will be conducted, digital copies of which will be placed in the public domain of the Archives.
The above activities are in line with the popularization of regional and national sources of Polish culture. The project will create a wide research platform for students, doctoral students and scientists representing various scientific disciplines: humanities, demographic, social, economic, and biological sciences, and a broad discussion/ research platform for amateur genealogists, regional historians, Poznań enthusiasts, residents of Poznań, the Greater Poland and Poland.