Datenbank "Adressbuch der Deutschen in Paris von 1854" - Database "Directory of German Migrants living in Paris in 1854"

This poster presents a database [Link] created as part of the research project "German Immigrants in Paris in the 19th Century" at the German Historical Institute in Paris (DHIP) [Link]. The database contains 4,772 addresses of German merchants, entrepreneurs, craftsmen and other self-employed persons who were resident in Paris and the neighbouring suburbs in 1854. The data is based on a printed book that has been digitized throughout the project: F-A. Kronauge. Adreßbuch der Deutschen in Paris für das Jahr 1854 oder vollständiges Adreßverzeichniß aller in Paris und seinen Vorstädten wohnenden selbständigen Deutschen in alphabetischer Ordnung. (1854). https://bibliotheques-specialisees.paris.fr/ark:/73873/pf0000884072.

The database serves as a starting point for prosopographical research, as the address must be known in order to search for individuals in other sources of the Paris Municipal Archives such as birth, baptism, marriage and death registers. Individuals can also be searched for in the annual issues of the "Bottin du commerce" in order to trace moves and departures. It is also interesting to compare the data with the "calepins du cadastre" in the Archives de Paris: periodic building records that describe every single house in the city with its flats and workshops and record tenants and rents.

The database was first established and published in 2003-2006 and then completely remodelled in 2020-2022 in collaboration with the Institut für Digital Humanities at Cologne university. The relaunch aimed at the FAIRification of the data, the digitisation of the print copy, the relaunch of the website and the visualisation of the data on a historical map. Open source products were used for all applications. The code is deposited at GitHub [Link]. The full sources are available at Zenodo here [Link].

The poster was designed by Mareike König for the evaluation of the German Historical Institute Paris in October 2022. It uses as main picture a heatmap of the data visualised on a historic map of Paris, created by Evan Virevialle using QGIS.