Life histories of persons marrying, between 1600 and 1999, and dying, in the Netherlands [GO924]

A data set based on marriages conducted between 1600 and 1999 in the Netherlands. Includes information on lifespans and marriage ages of spouses (focal spouse and other), also location data for births, marriages and deaths. Includes information on lifespans and death locations of parents of the spouses. Includes information on whether the marriage, birth and death locations were urban or rural between 1600 and 1800, based on whether a place contained 5000 or more inhabitants (using a database developed by Bosker et al. 2013 [Rev. Econ. Stat., 95(4), 1418-1437 doi:10.1162/REST_a_00284]). The data set is derived from a genealogical database, which was constructed from family tree (GEDCOM) files contributed by users of www.genealogieonline.nl, via a program in which genealogists who were registered with the website were invited to contribute their family trees for scientific research purposes. The genealogical data from contributed files was error-checked before being combined into a single database using the TreeChecker application (http://www.treechecker.net). From the initial pool of >1600 contributed files, 924 files were included in the database after an assessment of the percentage of errors in each file, hence the database is known as the GO 924 set. Duplicate marriages were identified by the year of marriage and the first 7 letters of each spouse surname, whereupon a random duplicate was selected for inclusion in the data set. Note that names of individuals and exact dates of marriages, births and deaths are excluded from this data set to prevent identification of individuals, as the genealogical data was provided to our research group on the basis that it would only be published in an aggregated or anonymised format. Access to the un-anonymised data may be granted subject to confidentiality agreements, please contact the authors for further information. Marriages were only included where the place of marriage was in the Netherlands, marriage age of the spouse was > 13 and the spouse died in the Netherlands. The dataset is in a long format, in which there is a separate record for each spouse. It can be determined whether the spouse is the husband or wife (and conversely whether the other is the wife or husband) by the `spouse_sex` variable. A description of each variable is included in the accompanying text file: GO924_married_and_dying_in_NL__VARIABLES.txt