Registers of births, marriages and deaths in the Historical archive in Pazin

Abstract

The registers were originally public documents whose aim was to validly prove the recorded facts, which are primarily births, marriages and deaths. For their juridical value they are a reliable source of data for various sciences. They contain data on the number of inhabitants, its natality and mortality rate, migrations, their patrimonial, social and confessional structure. They offer pieces of information on the average age, the death rate of newborns, the ethnic structure of the population. Historians often seek in them information on single personalities, while those interested in the history of medicine look for causes of death and epidemics. To ethnologists they indirectly offer data on customs connected with the choise of the spouse, best man and godfather, the choice of a name for the child. A linguist could, on the basis of the listed names, evaluate the data on linguistic and dialectologic location of the region’s inhabitants. In this paper, the A. presents a short review of the historical development of registers, with particular reference to the regulations guiding their writing. He separately writes on the registers of births, marriages and deaths in Istria, and on the formation of the collection of registers in the Historical Archive in Pazin. In an appendix, a survey of registers in the Pazin Archive is given.