On the eve of their marriage in 1682, Hans Hürning and Barbara Herrenmann, like all German couples of their time, invited a local official into each of their homes to catalog every single one of their possessions. The resulting list was exhaustive. It included not just their land and livestock, like his 3 hens and 1 beehive, but every article of clothing (his new calfskin trousers, her old black taffeta bonnet), assorted household goods (1 fire-bucket, 1 grain-husking basket, 1 dung-fork with iron tines), and even the wooden items she made while apparently planning her future (1 diaper-chest without ironwork, 1 cradle). It’s something to behold, a total catalog of a human’s belongings captured — as perhaps only the Germans could — in a meticulously organized and scrupulously detailed list.
Empty trash. Buy milk. Forge history.
To trace the great arcs of civilization, historians tap the humble list
Three hundred years after Hans and Barbara made their lists, a graduate student named Sheilagh Ogilvie began searching through the archives of central German villages for a dissertation topic. In every town she visited there would inevitably be reams of such lists, and she was shocked to find how pervasive and untouched these household inventories were. They had been produced by the local municipalities at marriage and death from at least the 17th century onwards, and in many cases nobody had looked at them for centuries: The sand used by scribes to blot the ink just after writing would often fall out onto her lap.
At the time, there were simply too many for her to try to research. But three years ago, armed with computing capabilities that did not exist in the 1980s, Ogilvie — now a professor at the University of Cambridge — began an ambitious project to process every one of the thousands of lists from two towns in the Württemberg region, beginning with the year 1602 and up until the late 1800s.
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