A Database of Causes of Death Based on Parish Registers from the Borderlands of Present-Day Slovakia. The Case of Detva Parish, 1861–1885

The article analyzes a database of causes of death compiled from individual parish registers for the town of Detva located in the present-day territory of Slovakia. The database covers the period from 1861 to 1885 and contains 9,600 entries. The town and its environs reflect the population of the seventh-largest settlement in Slovakia, which ranged from 10,000 to 12,000 inhabitants during the period under study. The population was 97% Catholic and predominantly Slovak-speaking. The article presents the motives for creating the database, the methods used to construct it, and the specific features of the parish registers from which the data were drawn. After construction, a basic classification of causes of death was performed according to the HistCat methodology. Across the entire database, the most common reasons for death came from infections, accounting for 25% of the total. The second most common category was diagnoses classified as ill-defined, with a 12.3% share, and the third most common category was tuberculosis (11.8%). These results confirm that the diagnosis of diseases displayed evident shortcomings, especially since the cause of death was not determined by a doctor, thus presenting new interpretative challenges.