The MAID database was compiled by Christa Matthys as part of her doctoral research “Sex and the City. Female domestic servants and diffusion of fertility in Flanders, 1830-1930” (supervisor Professor Dr. Isabelle Devos). This research was funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO).

Life-course analysis has been the dominant approach in historical demography since the late 1980s. The socio-demographic life courses of large groups of individuals are reconstructed and studied in order to discover and explain behavioural patterns. The most appropriate sources for this type of research are population registers.

Belgium is one of the few countries in the world that has kept population registers, starting as early as 1847 (or even earlier in some municipalities). They provide the core data for this database. Population registers were drawn up per municipality following a census. They contain all the individual data from the census and were continuously supplemented with new information until the next census. They recorded births, marriages, migrations, divorces and more.

Thanks to this detailed information, it is possible to reconstruct the lives of people when they left their original municipality. The data from the population registers were supplemented with information from civil registers and other nominal data.