Parish sources on digital bases: The Beyond Center-South Project and the Portuguese-Brazilian population studies

Abstract

This work is the result of an ongoing research at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and is part of a broader project called “Beyond the Center-South: for a history of the colonial population in the extremes of Portuguese domains in America”, which objective is to build a broad database about the population of Portuguese and, later, Brazilian territories, during the 18th and 19th centuries, in order to advance the investigation of the demographic regimes that characterized the region. The project is an inter-institutional initiative, started in 2008, and has sought to standardize methodological procedures for collecting and processing document sources, enabling comparative analyses in time and space. The initiative promotes the indexing of document bases, mainly of an ecclesiastical nature, using the NACAOB software, enabling the reconstitution of families using the methodology proposed by Fleury and Henry. To date, more than 175 thousand records have been registered, covering more than 830 thousand individuals. For this study, we established as a sample the documentation of the parish of Triunfo, located in the Rio Grande de São Pedro Captaincy, between the mid-18th and early 19th centuries.