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Project resources

One of the pillars of the Debrecen 1870 (DTTTA1870) geo-database is the collection of the original census data sheets of the 1869 census, which was conducted in 1869 according to the Act III of 1869, and which survives almost entirely in the town of Debrecen. The other pillar is a purposefully selected set of contemporary cadastral maps of the city. The original textual sources have been sorted into a database and the results of later scientific work on the subject have been incorporated into the database, as well as the results of other publications, such as topographical aids, published for the census.

The realization of the historical GIS database integrated with geo-referencing was made possible by the fact that in Debrecen in the second half of the 19th century, the plots of land were registered in ascending numerical order and the unique identifier of the properties was the officially established house number. The Debrecen 1870 (DTTTA1870) geo-database uses this unique house number, which is the same as the starting data used in the census and the cadastral map, as the common identification key of the system.

Census documents

The very extensive collection of documents of the complete census of 1869 in Debrecen is in the care of the Hajdú-Bihar County Archives of the Hungarian National Archives (Debrecen, Vármegyeháza utca 1/B.). The collection of documents from 1869/1870 forms a significant part of the census records of the town of Debrecen. (reference: EN MNL HBVL IV.1109 - volume: 6,75 linear metres) In the first phase of the scientific processing, the often difficult to read, handwritten sheets ('Declaration sheet for the census of the population and domestic animals' and the 'House-hunting register') were recorded in tabular form, with data on properties, dwellings, owners and occupants. Before linking the Excel spreadsheets, which covered the contemporary inland area in a system of six districts, broken down into separate streets, the fields had to be classified by name and new grouping fields had to be inserted, e.g. for religions, occupations, place of origin, etc. The data entered in the registers were then aggregated in a scientific and credible manner, according to scientific requirements and professional criteria, and organised in a database harmonised for the whole city under study and matched with the common identification keys on the map.

From the notification sheet of the municipal theatre in Nagy-Cegléd street (Debrecen house no.20)

The map source

The territorial delimitation of the Debrecen 1870 (DTTTA1870) historical geographic information system - roughly the part of the settlement within the major ring road of the present city - was marked by the boundaries of the plots of land counted as urban intestines in the 1869 census, from 1 to the following. The primary cartographic basis of the project is the cadastral map of Debrecen, which was certified in 1872 and 1873, almost at the same time as the census, and is part of the "Collections" of the Hungarian National Archives Hajdú-Bihar County Archives (HU MNL HBVL), marked XV.2.b. The integration of the map sheets into the integrated system started with the complete digitisation of the scanned image files (DVK 24.) of the coloured and in 1873 certified cadastral survey of the central inner area of the settlement drawn at a scale of 1:720, printed in A1 size, mounted on cardboard and then folded and stapled in A4 format.

Cover page of the cadastral map of the town of Debrecen from 1873. (HU MNL HBVL XV.2.b. DVK 24)

And since some of the plots numbered for the interior at the time of the census were outside the area covered by the 1873 map sheets, the second stage was to complete the resulting digital map work. The source was the coloured clarification of the cadastral map sheets recorded on the complete exterior of Debrecen, drawn at a scale of 1:2880 and certified in 1872, registered in the archives HU MNL HBVL XV.2.b. DVK 1. The map work, consisting of a series of folded, stapled sheets printed in A1 format, laminated on cardboard and folded in A4 format, was fully digitised and integrated into an integrated system of scanned file images of the sheets depicting the land districts of the district directly linked to the interior. To ensure the accurate insertion of the new elements, the distortions resulting from the significant differences in scale between the two types of map had to be addressed, and occasional additions had to be made to fill in the cartographic gaps caused by mowing on cardboard and by a century and a half of use.

The purposeful digitisation process has resulted in the conversion of the drawing and character information, which is separated in the source map symbol system, into independent map layers. In the finished project, the vector file of the 1870 cadastral map can be linked as a base layer, but the colour raster map or the "Google Satellite" or "OpenStreepMap" showing the present conditions can be selected as overlay.

Cover page of the cadastral map of Debrecen from 1872(HU MNL HBVL XV.2.b. DVK 1)

Managing source data

The spatial data linking, querying, matching and testing of the database compiled from Excel files of the census data and the digitised data of the cadastral maps of the 19th century revealed data discrepancies in the hundreds of data already the first time.

The discrepancies between the contemporary summary sheets and the map database (e.g. the absence of about 150 persons, the wrong house numbers for dwellings and their occupants, numerical discrepancies between the two registers, etc.) could be corrected from the original "Registration sheet for the census of population and households" and the "House collection register", which was closed on 31 December 1869. On several occasions the name of the owner, for example, was missing or misspelled. This was mostly corrected from the original record sheets or from the map inscription. In other cases, the incorrect or contradictory classification of occupants, dwellings or families was found. Wrong house numbers had to be corrected, misspellings of the personal names of the inhabitants, incorrect definitions of building and room functions, etc. Such and similar anomalies were corrected and standardised by comparing data from printed and manuscript maps, other archival and other censuses and records, made before and/or after the period of the census.

A further problem was that the data of the original enrolment sheets did not always coincide with the data in the geographic information system and the contemporary summaries (e.g. the 308-page Annexes I-III of the original census, p. 85, p. 85, p. 1109.p. 1109). The elimination of the resulting consistency gaps, the correction and typing of the heterogeneous entries created at the time of the original recording were helped on several occasions by the separate regional and occupational aggregations kept in the archives, and on other occasions by the data corrected at the time of the original aggregation in contemporary national statistical publications. (It is worth noting that the inaccuracies of the original census aggregates could first have been revealed only by the complex comparisons and queries of this geographic information project, since there were no such exact, let alone map-based, feedbacks for the 1870 summaries.)

Cover and one page of the Annexes I-III of the 1869 census

In the original population data, the place of origin and place of birth of a significant number of the census enumerated persons is incomplete, with abbreviations and spellings that are difficult to identify. The replacement and correction of place, area and country names is based on contemporary statistical and country descriptive publications, as well as on the EN MNL HBVL IV. 1109/p. 13-37. archival census collection of 1850. It should be stressed that the special (e.g. linguistic) conditions of the Israelite population also meant that the name records were highly incomplete and heterogeneous. These could be incorporated into the project by means of professionally formatted corrections, additions and replacements based on information obtained from the analysis of other, independent so-called Jewish censuses (e.g. volumes HBVL IV. 1109/p 86-87 etc.).

After the professional correction and standardisation of the 1869 basic data linked to the integrated database, both the individual information related to persons and houses/dwellings were coded at the system level for the purpose of map-based thematic retrieval. In addition to the coding of the place of birth/origin of individuals in the resident population according to the territorial system, the occupation/livelihood has been coded, grouped and classified into sectors at several levels of depth.

In addition to the classification of property ownership (private or public, sectoral within the latter, local owner and foreign, etc.), the function and use of buildings/apartments has been identified according to a hierarchical code system - in preparation for the study of urban zoning. In the integrated geographic information system managing data on a total of 3667 properties, 8198 dwellings and 37506 persons, the house and population census layers relating to 1869 were supplemented with address, ownership and area data from 1845 for the plots concerned, based on the archival documents of the HU MNL HBVL IV. 1011/k 543/1845. In the results window of the queries that can be started from the system, the census of 1857 HU MNL HBVL IV. 1109/p 72-73. with archival identification number 1109/p 72-73. In the results window, the latest historical data of the given map place is given with the street name and house number corresponding to the house numbering introduced from 1898, based on the archival record set HU MNL HBVL IV. 1405/b 195. d. 55/1898 and the related publication.

Aids and publications used