The UC Croatia Project

  

01.V.2008

 

 

History of the UC Croatia Project

The UC Croatia Project was conceived by E. A. Hammel in the early 1980s with financial support at various points 1983-03 from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Slavic and East European Studies at U. C. Berkeley, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and logistical support throughout from the Department of Demography at U. C. Berkeley.1

The project was initiated in the spirit of comparative social analysis to explore the differences in demographic behavior between otherwise identical peasant populations living under civil vs. military serfdom before and and after emancipation, and between populations of different ethnicity but under the same feudal regime, on the Habsburg-Ottoman frontier c. 1700-1900.  Planning began with conversations between Hammel, Frank Dubinskas (an anthropology doctoral student at Stanford who had worked in the region under Hammel's supervision), and Dr. Olga Supek (then of the Institute for Ethnology and Folklore, Zagreb). In 1983 Hammel began work in archives in Vienna, Zagreb, and Budapest. This work was facilitated by the advice and cooperation of Michael Mitterauer, Rainer Münz, Wolfgang Lutz, Joseph Eimer, Rudolph Andorka, and Tamas Farago in Austria and Hungary. The majority of work unfolded in Zagreb, with the active assistance of the staff of the State Archive of Croatia, particularly Dr. Josip Kolanović (later Director of the Archive) and the encouragment of Vladimir Stipetić, Alica Wertheimer-Baletić, and Jakov Gelo of the Faculty of Economics. Most particularly it was assisted by staff and logistical support from the Institute of Ethnography and Folklore, under the directorship of Dr. Dunja Rihtman-Augustin, especially by Jasna Čapo (who later took her doctorate in Demography at Berkeley).  The basic collection of parish data took a number of years of effort, supervised by Čapo in Zagreb. Initial efforts at family reconstitution were undertaken in Fortran by Ruth Deuel, with assistance from Čapo, later modified by Marcia Feitel. Final efforts at reconstitution, using the Perl language, were begun by Hammel with the advice of Carl Mason about 1996 and improved and finalized by Aaron Gullickson starting about 1998.

The final version of this website will contain all of the originally transcribed data, in standardized format, the linked reconstitution data, and the Perl code used in the linkages. Readers of these materials should note that the original manuscript data and their unmodified transcription are the property of the State Archive of Croatia, or the Republic of Croatia, or the Bishopric of Zagreb.2 The processed data are the property of the Regents of the University of California and are in the public domain for legally permissible noncommercial purposes only. Genealogists should note that nominal data linkages are not free of error.

That said, the scholarly community is encouraged to make use of these data.

 

The following links provide access to the documents:                                                                                 




Note 1: None of the agencies or institutions named are responsible for errors in these data.
Note 2: Parish records up to about 1848 were copied from the State Archive of Croatia. Parish records after that date were collected from police stations in Slavonia. Some ancillary information was obtained from the archives of the Bishopric of Zagreb. Information on libri status animarum from the parish of Cernik were copied from the books in the Monastery of Cernik.


Back to the top