“We have already done this for the cities of Amsterdam and Maastricht,” says Mayra Murkens, assistant professor at the University of Groningen. Together with historians from other universities, she is involved in the Causes of Death project, which aims to make death data from various major Dutch cities searchable.
Murkens: “We already knew that infectious diseases and contagious conditions were often the culprit in the 19th century. What is striking about this research are the large regional differences.”
Infant mortality
“It appears that the number of cases of infant mortality in Amsterdam differs greatly compared to Maastricht. In the northwest of the country, infant mortality has been decreasing since about 1870, while in Maastricht, for example, this only really happened from 1915.”
Murkens came to this conclusion after the obituaries in both cities had been processed into datasets and the figures could be easily compared. The same process is now being applied to the Haarlem obituaries.
The universities use ‘citizen scientists’. “They go through all the scans of the obituaries and death registers. They decipher the handwritten texts and process this data into digital data,” Murkens explains.
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