One-place Study - Introduction

Introduction

In the course of a one-place study, a prime objective is to transcribe the registers of christenings, marriages and burials of the parish church so they can be restructured into family order in a database. This is then correlated with other archival records such as tax, land and testamentary documents, and published as a biographical index. When such a study is done scientifically as a precursor to academic analysis, it is known as family reconstitution.

The term one-place study is sometimes also used for a microhistory of a single urban street and its residents, including the changes in land ownership, agricultural or commercial activities.

Unlike a local history, which focuses on the past as described by residents, a one-place study can provide a statistical approach that reveals hidden relationships, particularly in homogeneous village communities where almost the entire population has inter-married over the centuries, and may even disprove local legends.

Read more about this topic:  One-place Study

Famous quotes containing the word introduction:

    For better or worse, stepparenting is self-conscious parenting. You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.
    —Anonymous Parent. Making It as a Stepparent, by Claire Berman, introduction (1980, repr. 1986)

    Such is oftenest the young man’s introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind. The mass of men are still and always young in this respect.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.
    Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)