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Contributions of family reconstitution studies to evolutionary reproductive ecology
Author(s) -
Voland Eckart
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
evolutionary anthropology: issues, news, and reviews
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.401
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1520-6505
pISSN - 1060-1538
DOI - 10.1002/1520-6505(2000)9:3<134::aid-evan3>3.0.co;2-m
Subject(s) - family tree , amateur , genealogy , german , reprint , politics , history , law , political science , archaeology , physics , astronomy
The method of family reconstitution has many fathers. About 100 years ago, the first pioneers began to edit a unique depository of European history, namely the church registers, with their data on vital events, which had been kept since early modern times. The aim was to compile the entries in a family‐centered way, making accessible a name‐based (nominative) evaluation of the data. Since then, thousands of amateur researchers interested in either genealogies or local history have conducted family reconstitutions. Weiss and Münchow 1 estimate that compilations of this kind have been made for about 5% to 10% of all German‐speaking regions, frequently as unpublished card files or typed manuscripts. Other compilations have been printed as Ortssippenücher, or books of local genealogies, and thus are accessible to the public. The personal, political, and scientific reasons for this work are extremely diverse and have their own history, which is not quite unproblematic, especially in Germany. 1 That fact makes the uninhibited handling of this material more difficult.