Mapping the Roma communities in 19th century Romania

The project aims at mapping the Roma communities in 19th century Romania using historical sources in Romanian and Russian archives to study the demography, family forms, geographic settlement patterns and socio-economic structure of the Romani ethnic peoples of Romania. The analysed data will focus on: size and composition of family and household structure for Roma; the ages at marriage, age differences between spouses, ages of mothers at birth of eldest surviving child; the geographic spreading of Roma within the villages; the population size and distribution of Roma inthe Romanian principalities; the occupations of the Roma as well as the Roma sub-groups.The project is multidisciplinary and combines social historical research, ethnography and linguistics. This is the first social history project dealing with East European Roma. Eastern European Roma have been the subject of very little historical research and this will be a pioneering effort to produce awareness of Romani social structure, family forms, and the degree of integration and/or exclusion in past time, as well as challenging some of the stereotypes regarding child-marriages and numerous children breeding mothers among the Romanian Roma. The project will be carried out by a multidisciplinary team with expertise in philology, anthropology, archive research, linguistics, and history. The research team will be supported by an IT specialist at SH, and a Romanian research assistant. The project will be carried out at the School of Culture and Education, but with physical placement of most team members at CBEES. The main outcomes of the project will be a collective volume (published in 2020) capitalizing the statistics of the Roma population in 1838, developed as an IT application and available online, and analyzing the demographic data from this and other contemporaneous archival and published sources, as well several scholarly articles and presentations, disseminated at project workshops and conferences.

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Final report - David Gaunt - Mapping the Roma communities in 19th century Romania