Mosaic: recovering surviving census records and reconstructing the familial history of Europe

TLDR

Demand for global historical family system data has risen, yet scholars have relied on simplified, region-based classifications. The article introduces Mosaic, a large-scale infrastructure project for historical demography and family sociology, and outlines its methodological and research opportunities for systematic study of historical family demography. Mosaic was built by addressing sampling, representativeness, and data structure challenges, and the article details its database design and coverage.

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the demand for global data on historical family systems, both in the social sciences and in the humanities. Until lately, however, scholars interested in historical global family variation had to rely on simplified and often ahistorical world-scale classifications of family systems by world geographic regions. This article communicates Mosaic to the scholarly community – one of the largest infrastructural projects in the history of historical demography and family sociology. The article provides a brief history of the project, a discussion of the main issues involved in creating the database (including sampling and representativeness), and Mosaic's data structure and coverage. In the remainder of the article, the authors provide an overview of methodological and research opportunities that the project can offer to scholars, showing how the most pertinent problems of historical family demography can be tackled in more systematic ways than previously.