One-place study

One-place studies are a branch of family history and/or local history with a focus on the entire population of a single road, village or community, not just a single, geographically dispersed family line.

In the course of a one-place study, a prime objective is to transcribe the registers of christenings, marriages and burials of the parish church so they can be restructured into family order in a database. This is then correlated with other archival records such as tax, land and testamentary documents, and published as a biographical index. When such a study is done scientifically as a precursor to academic analysis, it is known as family reconstitution.

The term one-place study is sometimes also used for a microhistory of a single urban street and its residents, including the changes in land ownership, agricultural or commercial activities.

Unlike a local history, which focuses on the past as described by residents, a one-place study can provide a statistical approach that reveals hidden relationships, particularly in homogeneous village communities where almost the entire population has inter-married over the centuries, and may even disprove local legends.

The world's first major one-place study is believed to have been an attempt started in Austria in 1920 by Konrad Brandner to chart a complete genealogy of the population of the Steiermark region.

After the Nazi takeover of Germany, the Nazi farming authority Reichsnährstand began a nationwide campaign in 1937 to document the "Aryan blood" of countryfolk by documenting the ancestry of every village in a Dorfsippenbuch. 30 such books were published by 1940. Nazi schoolteachers led the copying of parish registers onto index cards, and boasted that 30,000 Heimat histories would be written, but the Second World War brought this project to a halt.

Though genealogy in Germany was to take decades to shake off this evil association, some enthusiasts resumed work on the card indexes or typewritten lists left from before the war, and the first new one-place study, now renamed an Ortssippenbuch, appeared in 1956. Later the term was changed yet again, to . More than 3,000 have appeared, with a trend away from print to electronic publication.

Untainted by Nazi associations, a French demographer, Louis Henry (1911–1991), was developing methods in France to survey historic populations. His 1956 book co-written with Michel Fleury, Des registres paroissiaux à l'histoire de la population. Manuel de dépouillement et d'exploitation de l'état civil ancien, explained how to start a one-place study.

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