Combining sources from historic personal, urban and image databases
The idea of bringing together several already existing databases with historic content relating to the city of Leipzig and its citizens started in the year 2019 and has now been consolidated under the patronage of the Leipzig City Archive and the Time Machine Organisation.
The Leipzig Time Machine will build up on four main sources of digital data made available by these partners:
- Project„altes-leipzig.de“:
- personal data from Leipzig newspapers (birth, marriage and death records for the entire population of the (inner) city ca. 1805 – 1900
- urban space data of the city centre (19th century) – edited in a 3D system
- Association for Computer Genealogy (CompGen) in cooperation with the Saxon State Archives Leipzig:
- personal data from the “Kartei Leipziger Familien”, in which church register data from about 1555 – 1850 are compiled (241,484 persons)
- personal data from the “Kartei Leipziger Kreisamtstestamente” 1696 – 1829 (about 4,800 testators, ongoing registration project)
Additional support comes from the Universities in Dresden, Halle-Wittenberg and Leipzig, more precisely from:
- Chair of Economic and Social History, TU Dresden (Susanne Schötz)
- Chair of Economic and Social History, Martin-Luther University MLU Halle-Wittenberg (Georg Fertig, Moritz Müller, Jan-Michael Goldberg)
- Institute for Computer Science, MLU Halle (Marcel Mernitz)
- Institute for Applied Computer Science (InfAI), University of Leipzig (Marco Büchler)
Currently the computer scientists of the MLU Halle are working on an algorithm to combine the data from newspapers etc. of “altes-leipzig.de” and the card index of Leipzig families (Kartei Leipziger Familien @ CompGen) for the overlap period (ca. 1830-50). At the same time the colleagues from “altes-leipzig.de” compare these two databases manually. This provides a quality control for linking algorithms.
To get a sneak peek of the work behind the Leipzig Time Machine, tune in on the recording of ICARUS’/ICARUS4all’s online webinar “Research in Times of Corona – part 4” focussing on the Time Machine Initiative including the Leipzig Time Machine.
Find the announcement of support by the City Archives Leipzig in our press coverage section.