Day 137,

Started on that census project after the children left today.  First thing I had to figure out was how far back to go as a starting point.  I wound up using Bartolome as my origin point.  Except for the obvious outliers of Pat and Theo, it was my understanding that he was one of the older individuals in the village and I knew his age since I had to record it when archiving the record of his death.  From there I went back an extra ten years just in case there are any other elders older than him still kicking about.  I figure I might miss one or two, but I should still end up close enough for the overall Village population.

I’ll admit, I’m actually a bit surprised that there’s not a separate list of births and deaths like the one I’m putting together.  As it stands those have always just been written mixed in with all the other archived town events, slotted wherever they happened to fall in chronological order.  Fortunately for me, in these early records that I’m starting with, the archivist at the time made a habit of highlighting these particular events, which speeds up the skimming considerably.

As for this census document (I’m sure there’s a better word for it, but I’m not sure what and this library contains neither dictionary nor thesaurus) I’ve opened up a new blank book and started just listing names down the page.  Keeping with a single column per page so I can write down additional identifying information beyond dates of birth and death.  For now just parents (usually found in the birth entries) and spouses (usually found in the death entries).  Well, I’m leaving spaces for spouses and deaths anyway.  Since I’m skipping any death entries for individuals born before my (admittedly arbitrary) start date and I only got through about a year and a half today there haven’t been any for me to actually write down yet.  I probably would have gotten further, but it’s easy to get distracted by reading the surrounding entries.

Also, I’ve actually left the first few pages of this “census” book blank for now.  I’m planning on putting some sort of forward in there explaining what it is and my methodology.  Some kind of documentation for whatever archivist comes after me to keep working on it as a living document.  My plan is that once I get up to the current date I’ll do some sort of marker to separate that initial baseline count from future entries and note the total population estimate at that time in the front of the book.  Then that number could be updated each year or so going forward as the new entries (added to this book at the same time as the main archival logs) get tallied up each year.

I guess I’ll theoretically need to count outsider arrivals as “births” although since it’s been a long time since there were two outsiders in the Village at the same time, that might not technically happen in my lifetime outside of marking off the old archivist’s arrival and death when I get to them.