The Scanian Economic-Demographic Database (SEDD) is a high-quality longitudinal data resource spanning the period 1646−1967. It covers all individuals born in or migrated to the city of Landskrona and five rural parishes in western Scania in southern Sweden. The entire population present in the area is fully covered after 1813. At the individual level, SEDD combines various demographic and socioeconomic records, including causes of death, place of birth and geographic data on the place of residence within a parish.

For the Netherlands, a rich new data source has become available which contains indexed civil certificates for multiple generations of individuals: LINKS. The current version of the dataset contains information on 1.7 million demographic events for the province of Zeeland in the 19th and early 20th centuries and will be extended to other provinces in the Netherlands in the near future. To be able to study demographic behaviour, life courses and family relations need to be reconstructed from the civil certificates.

The Intermediate Data Structure (IDS) provides a standard format for storing and sharing individual-level longitudinal life-course data (Alter and Mandemakers 2014; Alter, Mandemakers and Gutmann 2009). Once the data are in the IDS format, a standard set of programs can be used to extract data for analysis, facilitating the analysis of data across multiple databases. Currently, life-course databases store information in a variety of formats, and the process of translating data into IDS can be long and tedious.

The paper describes the methods used to create a database to study the fall of fertility in Tasmania, a colony of Australia, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The database was initially created from digitised Tasmanian vital registration data using techniques of family reconstitution.