Autori
Ball, Roii
Fertig, Georg

Titolo
After Neckarhausen. The Neckarhausen Research Database, Public Research Data, and New Fields of Investigation
Periodico
Quaderni storici
Anno: 2025 - Volume: 178 - Fascicolo: 1 - Pagina iniziale: 71 - Pagina finale: 114

This article revisits David Sabean’s study of Neckarhausen, exploring how social-historical research on kinship can be conducted today using digitized sources, online databases, and new analytical tools. To demonstrate some of the possibilities these sources offer researchers, we present two data corpora: the Neckarhausen Research Database and a subset of the Online Heritage Books ("Ortsfamilienbücher"), which covers Württemberg, north-west Germany, and the county of Wittgenstein. Using these corpora, we identify the first couples to marry kin of specific types and contextualize their choices through legal norms, regional dynamics, and database information. A tentative comparison reveals a recurring link between innovative marriage strategies and local power holders – a pattern first observed by Sabean – though these actors differed in their positions of power. In the southwest, they were office-holding farmers; in the northwest, they were large-scale landowners; and in Wittgenstein, they were princely elites. We argue that digital history can facilitate the kind of micro-historical, network-based, variation-seeking analysis that Sabean envisioned and pioneered on a wider scale. Recognizing that Sabean’s kinship study does not primarily rely on demographics or statistics, but rather is a comparative reconstruction of kin networks, underscores its foundational role in historical kinship research today.



SICI: 0301-6307(2025)178:1<71:ANTNRD>2.0.ZU;2-X
Testo completo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.1408/119355
Testo completo alternativo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1408/119355

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