Vienna Database on European Family History

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The Vienna Database on European Family History is a collection of census type listings of European villages and towns from the 17th to the 20th century. This edition is the result of a co-operation of the Max Plank-Institute for History in Göttingen, the Department of History of the University of Salzburg and the Department of Economic and Social History of the University of Vienna. The database was created in a series of research projects of the Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna, directed by Michael Mitterauer from 1974 to 1984. Only the part of this database which was recorded in a source-oriented way is presented on this homepage.

These data contain information of census lists and soul books (status animarum) of Viennese suburbs from the 19th century, Zagreb from 1857, Kostanz from 1774, Roman parishes from the 17th to 20th century, Zurich and villages in the canton Zurich from the 17th to 19th century and of Fribourg from the 19th century. The data are available as SPSS portable files. Besides the data there is a short description of the sources, of the local and social surroundings and a select bibliography. Although we tried to clean the data several times, we cannot guarantee a database completely free of errors. We would be pleased, if you could inform us about the problems you find in the data.

Our special thanks belong to Josef Ehmer, who had the idea for this edition, Manfred Thaller from the University of Cologne and Michael Mitterauer from the Institute for Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna. Then we want to thank Jan Oldervoll from the University of Bergen in Norway, who offered us the opportunities of interactive analysis on the Web. Lastly we want to thank Needra Bigcham, Jim Brown, Franz Eder, Thomas Grotum, Ernst Jeschek, Erich Landsteiner, Ingrid Matschinegg, Albert Müller, Renata Porc, Reinhold Reith, Marco Sordini, Richard Wall and Dieter Wurmbrand for their help in various matters.

Annemarie Steidl and Heinz Berger



For all questions or suggestions please send an e-mail to

annemarie.steidl@univie.ac.at or heinrich.berger@univie.ac.at