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.
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