IntroductionThe materials presented in these pages come primarily from the publication People and Places in Colonial Venezuela (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976). That book, produced camera- ready using relatively primitive technology by today's standards, had the advantage of preserving the text in machine-readable form. This web-based version includes only that part of the text related directly to the census records themselves. The conversion process from the 1970s text formatting program to Hypertext Markup Language (html) proceeded with minimal complications. Since the original had diacritical markings put in by hand, the html version required editing to restore the Spanish orthography. Errors, nonetheless, may still remain, and as we identify them we will revise the e-text to reflect the corrections. This web-based version of People and Places provides the complete census records used for the original publication. For those interested in the summary tables and other analysis in the original, the printed volume is available from TheCenter at the University of Florida, although out-of-print at the Indiana University Press. The original Chapter II (presented here under the title Counting and Classifying) and Chapter III (under the title Hamlets, Villages, Towns, and Cities) of People and Places describe the materials and places them in context. The Data section of this version introduces the original parish records. The introductory page includes a link to the complete collection of the Type III parish records in Excel 7.0 format, suitable for downloading (although the 591kb file may take some time on a dial-up line). The first page includes a codebook for the Excel file and a link to the Parishes section. The Parishes section has parish by parish tables with the complete returns available for each parish of Type III censuses presented by year. The main page of this section presents an index that links each parish name to its table of complete parish census returns. In addition, a section with Regions and State information offers a guide to the location of each parish. Each individual parish page contains, in addition to the data for that parish for all the years with available census records of Type II, a code for the state and map location of that parish. The location codes refer to the Atlas de Venezuela. "Mapa Fisiográfico de la República de Venezuela" (1962), Caracas: Ministerio de Obras Públicas, Dirección de Cartografía Nacional, 1971, pp.123-124. The States and Federal Territories also come from the Atlas de Venezuela, pp.23-116. Some of the artwork and a few of the more useful illustrations from the original also appear, although on a slow connection some of these may take some time to download. Finally, this e-text includes the original Preface, not because all of its projections of future activities have taken place, for many reasons most have not, but to recognize again those many people and institutions who made it possible to collect this information and provide it in the printed version of People and Places and the e-version located here. John V. Lombardi |