Church Death Registers as a Source for Researching Causes of Death Before and During World War I. The Case of the Parish Church in Dračić (Serbia)

This paper analyses the causes of death among the inhabitants of villages belonging to the parish of the church in Dračić, in the Valjevo region, during the period 1909–1918. The main source is the church death register, whose entries are grouped according to broad categories of causes of death. The aim is to show, through the example of a rural parish in western Serbia, the research potential and limitations of church death registers for the study of local mortality patterns. Special attention is paid to the comparison of two five-year subperiods: 1909–1913, treated as a predominantly peacetime, baseline comparative period before World War I, and 1914–1918, the period of World War I. Although 1912 and 1913 were years of the Balkan Wars, they are analysed within the broader pre-war pattern of local mortality, since the fighting did not take place on the territory of the parish and did not decisively change the structure of causes of death. The results show that epidemic diseases were the most important cause of death both before and during World War I, while direct war-related deaths formed a separate but incompletely recorded category. The paper highlights the possibilities and limitations of using such sources in historical-demographic and epidemiological research

Cause of death · First world war · Historical demography · Period (music) · Spanish Civil War · World War II · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History of Medicine Studies · Insurance, Mortality, Demography, Risk Management