Elo da história demográfica de Minas Gerais: reconstituição e análise inicial dos registros paroquiais da freguesia de N. Sª da Conceição do Antônio Dias, 1763-1773

Abstract

The Brazilian colonial society is characterized by high levels of illegitimacy, typical patterns of marriage and family formation and high mobility. During this period, the slavery has played an essential role in the formation and evolution of its social and demographic structures, as well. As a consequence, these factors prevent the general application of the family reconstitution technique created by Henri (1977) to the Brazilian colonial context. Taking that into account, this paper proposes the application of the Amorims parishes reconstitution technique as a methodological alternative, exploring its analytical potential in the case study of the Vila Ricas Antônio Dias parish, from 1763 to 1773, based upon parochial series of baptisms, deaths and marriages as well as other sources. The colonial Antônio Dias parish is rather small, but even so, it assembles thousands of individuals entry-forms of successive generations, which resulted in an extremely large dataset. The parochial series are regular enough, showing no perceptible gaps, but instead an excellent chronological enchainment of records, pages and serial entry-books. In general, all records were homogeneously wrote down so that the birth date, name of parents, grandparents, godfathers and addresses were seldom omitted. The parishes reconstitution method allows that the information be organized in such a way that the individuals can be followed either throughout their personal life path as well as within the family and social group. The basic sample upon the preliminary analysis was performed revealed some of the parishes reconstitution methods virtualities. Even in such a shorter period (1763-1773), and notwithstanding the problems associated with data quality, the assessment of the method has proved its usefulness in the recovery of information. Among them, we succeeded to obtain data such as age and parenthood of the mothers of children born within the time period, recommending its further application to the Brazilian colonial context.