CHILD (Collecting Hasburgical Information on Life and Death)

This work focuses on child mortality, and mainly on infant and neonatal mortality, during the 19th century in Veneto, Northeastern Italy. In this region the levels of infant mortality during the period 1750-1850 are among the highest ever recorded for a large area over a long period. This peculiar characteristic is mainly due to the exceptionally high neonatal winter mortality. The Department of Statistics of the University of Padova has developed the project CHILD (Collecting Hasbugical Information on Life and Death), recording nominative data on births and deaths in the age 0-4 years in 46 parishes of the Central Veneto (provinces of Venice, Padova, Treviso, Vicenza and Verona). CHILD is based on the Habsburg registers, compiled by the priests between 1816 and 1870. The availability of data on 152,000 births and 62,000 deaths, linked using nominative keys, allowed to carry out a careful study on mortality in the first five years of life, pushing the differential analysis to a degree of consistency not feasible for small communities.