The Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN)

The Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) strives to construct life histories as completely as possible for a representative portion of the nineteenth and twentieth century population in The Netherlands. The sample, for this purpose, has been drawn from all persons born in The Netherlands between 1812 and 1922. Ultimately, the HSN database will include information on an individual level from 77,000 persons on subjects like age at marriage, religious affiliation, the number of children born, occupation, birth place, literacy, social network and migration history.

The HSN started around 1987 with the formation of a work group whose members were from different social science disciplines like sociology, social-economic history, social geography, economics and demography, all sharing relatively strong historical interest. The members of this group came from several Dutch universities.

Aim of the Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) is to construct life courses as completely as possible for a representative sample of the nineteenth and early twentieth century population of the Netherlands and to make the data available to scientific researchers in the Netherlands and abroad. Although the database of the HSN is an historical database in which the largest part of the included individuals is no longer alive, some still are. This implies that the HSN is bound to the regulations of the Dutch Personal Data Protection Act...