State of Souls Registers

State of Souls Registers are a form of population listing made by the Catholic church following guidelines laid down at the Council of Trent (1545 - 63). Most registers list the population of a town or rural parish by family. The amount of detail given for each family and each person varies considerably. Many examples here are drawn from the excellent registers of Ascoli Satriano, Puglia, Italy in the 18th Century. These examples follow the family of Lionardo Popoli through a number of documents.

Making a register

Registers appear to have been compiled by the parish priest or in a larger settlement by priests working for a senior ecclesiastic. This compiler would visit each house in turn and record the names and other details of residents. In Ascoli the document appears to follow a processional route from the Bishop's Palace to the Ducal Castle and then to the San Potito monastery. Ideally, the information would be collected and written down in accordance with a formula. A number of formula books and example sheets have survived, such as the Orsini formulary for the Benevento Archdiocese.

Although such listings were supposed to have been made annually, this was rarely the case. The Bishop or his staff made inspections of each parish from time to time and noted irregularities on the part of the priest. Failure to present an up to date State of Souls register may be noted in records of such inspections.

Contents of a register

According to the Benevento formula, a register should show the date and place and the name of the compiler on the first page. Then the population should be listed within each parish and district by house and by family within a multi-family house. The name of the owner of each house should be provided and whether the residence is owned or rented ( à pigione). For each person the following information should be given:

	name, surname, parents, place and diocese of origin
	age in years and marital state (or ecclesiastic)

The compiler should also put a C in the margin for those who could communicate and Cr for people who had been confirmed.

The Benevento style registers, such as those made between 1715 and 1765 for Ascoli by the Archpriests Misisca and Visciola, represent best practise and are rare, even within that archdiocese. Most listings fall far short of this ideal. The Quenza register of 1757 is a more typical example.

Purpose of the Registers

Why did the church go to all this trouble?

Firstly and expressly, to have a record of the parishioners or townspeople and whether they could take communion or not, and whether they had been confirmed. A cross noted families who had gone to live elsewhere. This latter point allows for the fact, that one survey might be used over several years and updated.

Secondly, because the clergy represented a significant proportion of the literate people in many areas before educational reforms in the 19th and 20th centuries. Priests were well placed to make administrative documents which might be of use to both church and secular authorities. There is evidence that secular powers did use these listings as the basis for their own administrative records.

The Neapolitan Catasto Onciario of 1753, is a fiscal register of population and land. The atti preliminari or 'preparatory documents' for Ascoli, expressly refer to the State of Souls register made in 1752 in drawing up population data by family. State administrations also used these ostensibly ecclesiastical documents as the basis for other taxation documents, such as fuoci or lists of 'hearths'.

Using the Registers

These listings appear to give a straightforward account of the population of a town or rural parish at a particular point in time. They should however be used with caution and a number of questions need to be asked.

Who is included? Although formularies state that all persons should be included whether of local origin or outsiders, this was not always the practice. A register may be restricted to a smaller area than a modern or contemporary administrative unit with the same name. For instance, the Ascoli listings cover only the urban population and not the large rural hinterland of the community which is known from other sources to have had a significant population.

As with modern censuses, there was the problem of whether or not to include persons who were absent but still considered part of the family, for instance those living and working away from home. Such people do seem to have been included in some registers, as evidenced by notes that they are resident elsewhere.

How reliable are the groups of people? This relates to the well known problem of the correspondence between family and household. Many listings show a large number nuclear families, but other documents challenge such an interpretation of residential groups.

In Quenza, there is a predominance of nuclear families but documents relating to the division of property, indicate that close kin inhabited separate apartments within the same house, and may have shared some facilities. The Ascoli registers list explicitly by house, but show subdivisions in many residences. The inhabitants of one division are frequently the kin of those of the others.

Another problem is the possibility that both secular and ecclesiastical authorities tended to nuclearise households in their descriptions. The family lists for the atti preliminari of the Catasto Onciario noted above, were in theory at least made by the heads of the families in question. They show a greater tendency to list extended families than State of Souls registers.

States have an interest in maximising revenue from taxation. If taxes are levied, in part at least, by some category of family or household, ( 'hearth',feux, fuoci), then the tendency might well be to make such groupings as small as possible to maximise their number. This consideration might influence ecclesiastical practise, but the church may also have its own reasons for preferring nuclear groupings. Religious observance, such as church attendance, taking communion and confirmation were regarded to a large extent as part of the responsibility of parents towards their children. Hence an interest in defining parent / child groups

Reliability of other data Ages are usually given in years but for children may be shown in years and months. As with most population listings, ages are often approximate, especially for older people. There is always a tendancy for people to round up or down to the nearest decade. This creates a 'bulge' of people aged, say, 40 years with corresponding dips for the late thirties and early forties.

Place of origin is not always reliable. Subsequent surveys may give different origins for the same person. Depending on proximity, the way in which place is specified may vary. Local towns and villages are clearly named, though variant spelling may be found. Immigrants from distant areas may only be located to provinces or even countries.

In a few cases in the Ascoli registers, persons may be listed twice. This appears to have happened with a newly married woman who has gone to live with her husband and with servants who 'live in' at the employers house but have family in the town.

From document to data