Digitization and linking of data about historical individuals in Denmark : Link-Lives and other innovative projects

Since 2019, the Danish National Archives has been working on the Link-Lives-project in close cooperation with the University of Copenhagen and other partners. The aim of the project has been to reconstruct historical life-courses where the same individual can be identified across as many types of records as possible. Based on domain experts’ manual links between records of identical individuals, the project has developed machine-learning algorithms that can identify likely links and thus create individual life courses for a very large portion of the Danish population from 1787 to 1921. Currently, the Link-Lives dataset contains 6,7 million life courses and 64 million records about individuals, and the number is ever growing. In the presentation, I will discuss how the Link-Lives-project, together with the 20th century register projects, and the transcription of the oldest parish registers will pave the way for a new Historical Person Register, hosted by the Danish National Archives. The Historical Person Register has recently been designated as a new national research infrastructure and will be developed in the years 2026-2030.