‘An Ancestor's Tale": digitisation and data collection

During the summer months, the researchers of the An Ancestor’s Tale project received quite some help from job students, most of them also history students at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Over a period of two sunny months, they diligently scanned inheritance returns from the past two centuries. Their work accounts for 33,000 scans, which will serve as the basis for the data input for the project. 

Why this titanic work? With the project ‘An Ancestor's Tale', we are trying to find out what people owned, in order to gain a better understanding of wealth inequality. 

For more info in this project, click here