Record linkage in the Cape of Good Hope Panel

In this paper we describe the record linkage procedure to create a panel from Cape Colony census returns, or opgaafrolle, for 1787--1828, a dataset of 42,354 household-level observations. Based on a subset of manually linked records, we first evaluate statistical models and deterministic algorithms to best identify and match households over time. By using household-level characteristics in the linking process and near-annual data, we are able to create high-quality links for 84 percent of the dataset. We compare basic analyses on the linked panel dataset to the original cross-sectional data, evaluate the feasibility of the strategy when linking to supplementary sources, and discuss the scalability of our approach to the full Cape panel.

N01, C81

census, machine learning, micro-data, record linkage, panel data, South Africa