The European Genealogical Archive Consortium (EGAC) has completed the first phase of its decade-long digitization initiative, releasing a fully indexed database of parish records from England, Germany, and Scandinavia dating back to 1600 CE.
The database, accessible through an open API, contains birth, marriage, and death records for an estimated 12 million individuals. Researchers can now conduct longitudinal kinship analyses spanning up to 15 generations without physical archive access.
Early analyses using the dataset have already produced significant findings on pre-industrial fertility patterns and infant mortality rates, with one team reporting a 40% decline in first-year mortality between 1700 and 1850 across all regions studied.