20 godparents and 3 wives – studying migrant glassworkers in post-medieval Estonia

During my PhD research, ‘Glass and its makers in post-medieval Estonia’, genealogical data for 1,248 German-speaking migrant glassworkers and their family members from the 16th–19th century was collected. The data was compiled using church books and other relevant records indexed, digitised and/or transcribed by the National Archives of Estonia (NAE) and the Digital archive of Estonian newspapers (DEA) managed by the National Library of Estonia. NAE has recently begun employing and training Transkribus, an AI-powered platform in the text recognition and transcription of locally compiled historical documents. DEA uses Optical Character Recognition which enables users to search but also correct automatically created texts from newspapers. The data collected from these sources was tabulated and published on DataDOI, an Open Access repository managed by the University of Tartu library. This paper reflects on using these tools for large-scale data collection and the motivation behind publishing the raw data Open Access and the effects of it on my research. Using Gephi, an open-source visualisation program, the connections between individuals and locations in this dataset are presented to demonstrate how this data can be used in network analysis. The results offer a look into the lives of migrant glassworkers in the 17th–19th century in Estonia with a particular focus on godparents and godchildren and the connections within the glassworking community.