Historical Census Table Dataset (19th, 20th centuries) − France

The dataset contains 250 images of handwritten census tables for years ranging from around 1650 A.D. until 1850 A.D. They come from two different French cities, Vic-sur-Seille (French department of Moselle) and Echevronne (French department of Côte d’Or). While they mention very ancient times, the documents are handwritten transcriptions of even older documents and are quite recent, probably written during the 19th or the 20th century. A naive analysis of the writing tells us that transcriptions were made by only a few different writers.

In terms of damages and degradations, we identify seven different document templates. T1 and T3 are pretty qualitative templates, without serious damage, for almost 90\% of the documents. Other templates include highly damaged documents or documents with specificities.

A notable aspect of this dataset is that the records are written using only two different physical paper templates. Templates n°1, 2, 3, 6 and 7 have 25 recordings while the templates 4 and 5 are bigger and can record up to 35 recordings. T4 and T5 are the bigger ones and differ from the rest of the documents. They represent less than 8% of the corpus, which is hence homogeneous.