St Andrews Research Repository

St Andrews University Home
View Item 
  •   St Andrews Research Repository
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • View Item
  •   St Andrews Research Repository
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • View Item
  •   St Andrews Research Repository
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • View Item
  • Login
JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

Linking Scottish vital event records using family groups

Thumbnail
View/Open
hm_familial.pdf (955.5Kb)
Date
02/04/2020
Author
Akgün, Özgür
Dearle, Alan
Kirby, Graham Njal Cameron
Garrett, Eilidh
Dalton, Thomas Stanley
Christen, Peter
Dibben, Christopher John Lloyd
Williamson, Lee Emma Palmer
Funder
Economic & Social Research Council
Economic & Social Research Council
Grant ID
ES/L007487/1
ES/K00574X/2
Keywords
Scottish vital event records
Record linkage
Linkage methods
Group linkage
Population reconstruction
Digitising Scotland
C Auxiliary sciences of history (General)
QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
History
Information Systems
DAS
Metadata
Show full item record
Altmetrics Handle Statistics
Altmetrics DOI Statistics
Abstract
The reconstitution of populations through linkage of historical records is a powerful approach to generate longitudinal historical microdata resources of interest to researchers in various fields. Here we consider automated linking of the vital events recorded in the civil registers of birth, death and marriage compiled in Scotland, to bring together the various records associated with the demographic events in the life course of each individual in the population. From the histories, the genealogical structure of the population can then be built up. Rather than apply standard linkage techniques to link the individuals on the available certificates, we explore an alternative approach, inspired by the family reconstitution techniques adopted by historical demographers, in which the births of siblings are first linked to form family groups, after which intergenerational links between families can be established. We report a small-scale evaluation of this approach, using two district-level data sets from Scotland in the late nineteenth century, for which sibling links have already been created by demographers. We show that quality measures of up to 83% can be achieved on these data sets (using F-Measure, a combination of precision and recall). In the future, we intend to compare the results with a standard linkage approach and to investigate how these various methods may be used in a project which aims to link the entire Scottish population from 1856 to 1973.
Citation
Akgün , Ö , Dearle , A , Kirby , G N C , Garrett , E , Dalton , T S , Christen , P , Dibben , C J L & Williamson , L E P 2020 , ' Linking Scottish vital event records using family groups ' , Historical Methods: a Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History , vol. 53 , no. 2 , pp. 130-146 . https://doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2019.1571466
Publication
Historical Methods: a Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2019.1571466
ISSN
0161-5440
Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2019, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher's policies. This is the author created accepted version manuscript following peer review and as such may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1080/01615440.2019.1571466
Description
Funding: This work was supported by ESRC Grants ES/K00574X/2 “Digitising Scotland” and ES/L007487/1 “Administrative Data Research Centre – Scotland.”
Collections
  • University of St Andrews Research
URL
https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/vhim20/53/2
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/20684

Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Advanced Search

Browse

All of RepositoryCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateNamesTitlesSubjectsClassificationTypeFunderThis CollectionBy Issue DateNamesTitlesSubjectsClassificationTypeFunder

My Account

Login

Open Access

To find out how you can benefit from open access to research, see our library web pages and Open Access blog. For open access help contact: openaccess@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Accessibility

Read our Accessibility statement.

How to submit research papers

The full text of research papers can be submitted to the repository via Pure, the University's research information system. For help see our guide: How to deposit in Pure.

Electronic thesis deposit

Help with deposit.

Repository help

For repository help contact: Digital-Repository@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Give Feedback

Cookie policy

This site may use cookies. Please see Terms and Conditions.

Usage statistics

COUNTER-compliant statistics on downloads from the repository are available from the IRUS-UK Service. Contact us for information.

© University of St Andrews Library

University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland, No SC013532.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter