The Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca has finalized the country’s first database on the Transylvania population between 1850 and 1914.

Almost 400,000 names are included in the database, which includes, in fact, three distinct data bases. The first is the one of the sources, and records data concerning births, marriages, deaths and other demographic information that has been extracted from the parochial registries of churches. The second is a standardized database created from the first one, which eliminated spelling and other errors. The third is a public, genealogical database compiling information from the first two data bases and continuously updated, which anyone interested can use to search for their ancestors.

Information was gathered about 378,243 individuals, representing 6.9% of the population born in Transylvania between 1850 and 1914, which is estimated at 5.4 million people. The researches compiled data found in Latin, Hungarian, German, and Romanian written with Cyrillic or Latin characters.

The database can be accessed at the link hpdt.ro:4080.

“As part of the project, more than 300,000 photographs of marital status parochial registries were taken. We have a large deposit of resources, a name and toponyms catalogue, and a list of jobs of that period. The largest challenge in the project was to decipher the hand-written names in the parochial registries, as each priest wrote differently from one record to another,” Luminiţa Dumănescu, the project's coordinator, explained.

The project began in 2014. It took place in a partnership with the Tromso University in Norway and was financed with the help of a EUR 650,000 Norwegian grant.

editor@romania-insider.com