The Civil Servants' Archive, Ministry employees 1845 - 1884

The Civil Servants' Archive: Ministry employees 1845 - 1884

Basic material: Edgeir Benum, University of Tromsø / University of Oslo

Description of the original material

The original material for this period was on a large file consisting of 4122 lines or short images. These were sorted by ascending serial number up to the person with serial number 1173. Then came the same people, again sorted by ascending serial number according to how many positions they had held in the ministry or directorate.

The original material was thus a job archive, where the number of positions a person has had determines how many short pictures the person gets in the archive. All variables that do not include position are the same in each card image that includes the same person. this applies:

year of birth of a civil servant
- gender of civil servant
- father's profession
- official residence of regions
- civil servant's domicile by city-country
- artium ulcers
- artium by type
artium by type and grade
higher education after degree year
- higher education by subject and type of examination
higher education by grade

Each record in the material provides information about two positions called 'current position' and 'next position', where 'next position' is the one that comes after 'current position' in time. The information available on these two positions in the original material is:

- type of position within the central administration (whether the position is within the ministry, directorate or outside the central administration)
- which ministry or directorate (if the position is within the central administration)
- type of position within the ministry or directorate (if the position is within the central administration)
- type of position outside the central administration (position before or after employment in a ministry or directorate)
- year of accession, year of departure and duration of the position for 'current position'

During processing of the material, a number of registration errors were found. These are corrected where it is clear what the correct code should be, otherwise it is coded for missing information. Blue. In two places, two short pictures were found that were completely identical to previous short pictures. These were removed so that the material included 4120 short pictures distributed among 1255 officials.

- RECODING
First, all the card images were arranged in ascending serial numbers so that all card images belonging to the same person came one after the other. The persons were thus sorted by ascending serial number. It is only for this period that the data includes employees in both ministries and directorates.
It was therefore decided not to include persons from this period who only had directorate appointments in the integrated archive.

The officials in the period were therefore sorted into two groups:

Officials with one or more ministerial appointments 930 officials
Officials without any ministerial appointments 325 officials

The file containing data on officials from group 1 was used in the further transcoding. Below is a brief description of the principles for the recoding of the individual variables.

It was desirable to code about the personal information that is the same in all records for a person. Variables were used in the first record for each person and then recoded. The following applies to the recoding of the relevant variables on the old file:

- V1 SEQUENCE NUMBER - This is currently retained on the recoded file.
- V49 OFFICIAL'S YEAR OF BIRTH - Here the month and day are unknown and are coded '99'. We assume that if the year of birth is greater than 70, the official was born in the 18th century or he was born in the 19th century.
- V50 OFFICER'S GENDER - Here the codes for man and woman have been changed.
- V51 FATHER'S PROFESSION - Columns 43-44 in the original material give a rough sorting of 'father's profession', while column 45 gives a detailing of some of these categories. The variable has a total of 53 values ​​that are coded to correspond to common values. Some of the codes are merged into larger categories and any error codes cause the variable 'father's profession' to have the value '999' which is a code for 'missing information'. Benum's material also contains a variable that indicates whether the father was a civil servant or not and also information about the ranking of those who were civil servants. This information is not relevant for the integrated archive.
- V59 OFFICIAL'S RESIDENCE BY REGION - The codes for this period are retained with the difference that they are extended by a digit that separates the codes for the different periods from each other. For this period, new code = 3000 + old code. Those born abroad have the non-numeric code '-'. These are coded first '9' and then manually coded back to 3010 which is the correct code. This applies to 8 civil servants in the file with ministry-employed civil servants.
- V60 OFFICIAL'S RESIDENCE DISTRIBUTED BY CITY-COUNTRY - For this variable, the old codes are also retained. Any codes other than those specified in the codebook are recoded to 99 'missing information'.
- V61 ARTIUM YEAR - We assume that all current years are 1