SEMQDB. Databases for Historians. Autumn 1998.

 

Exercise Four: Implementing a Database. Weeks 9 to 12.

 

This exercise is worth 20% of the total marks for the course. It involves two stages, the first being the implementation of a database to describe the population of Sidbury from 1560 to 1812 and the second the use of this database to study the change in population over this period.

 

The exercise should be handed in on Thursday 17th December 1998. The written report should be handed in at the last lecture or placed in the pigeon-hole by 5pm on that day.

 

(a) Create a database with the additional tables needed to study the population and according to the design from exercise 3. Since there is a lot of work involved in this stage, each person should take a limited number of years, as shown on the back of this sheet, and prepare a table for everyone who is first mentioned in the years indicated. This will include all children baptised and women married in those years as well as anyone buried who had not previously been mentioned and any wives whose name first appears in a baptism record in that time period.

 

(b) Bring your tables to the lab session on Thursday 10th December and copy all the records from everyone's table into a master copy which you can then copy to use for the rest of the exercise.

 

(c) Use your database to list the people living in Sidbury at twenty year intervals throughout the period being studied. You will be unable to give exact figures, especially during the gap in the records, but you should be able to include approximate start and end dates for each name and use these to list those present and hence obtain estimates of the population change over the years.

 

(d) From the lists you have obtained, give an estimate of the way in which the population changed over the years. Comment on the assumptions made when filling in the start and end dates associated with each name and hence comment on the reliability of your results.

 

(e) State what other data would be needed to improve the reliability of your results and estimate the number of man-hours (or woman-hours - I assume they will be the same) needed to collect such data and add it to your database.

 

The table "person" should contain the following fields:-

 

Name1             Christian name.             Text string of length 20

Name2             Surname.                                  Text string of length 20

Start                 start date                                  integer giving year

End                  end date                                   integer giving year

BapId               pointer to baptisms                   integer

Mar1Id                        pointer to marriages                  integer

Mar2Id                        pointer to marriages                  integer

BurId               pointer to burials                       integer

HId                  pointer to hearth tax                  integer

 

Do not include a primary key until all the records have been imported to a single table.

 

 

Susan Laflin. 25th November 1998.