The Springfield Baptist Church Cemetery : An Exercise in Historical Demography

This work describes the use of three sources of data, cemetery inscriptions, vital registrations of births and deaths, and the manuscript census rolls. Consequently, it emphasizes the technique and methodology of the investigation. While the primary purpose of the study was to discover the uses and limitations of the material, observations about the sample never the less derive from the data, for the tools of historical demography can provide information about the population that becomes almost biographical in nature