Profiling the Survivors: An Exploratory Study of Colonial Records in Search for the Elderly Characteristics and their Living Conditions in the Brazilian Urban Context

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, it aims at reviewing the existing qualitative and quantitative data resources eligible to supporting studies of human longevity, in the field of historical demography, of colonial Brazil. It proposes exploring the informative potentialities of the vast nominative colonial records of Minas Gerais. The expected result is a descriptive inventory of the sources suitable for empirical investigation into various aspects of the social life of a highly urbanized context, searching for useful demographic serial data scattered among various types of registers. For some representative towns, the wide institutional spectrum of documentation produced a rich assembly of data, which covers nearly all social aspects of the populations. Contrary to the common sense, detailed information on individuals of the lowest social strata, namely slaves and freedmen, can be recovered from regular nominative listings of such populations.
Second, it intends to present individual cases of good data quality, for all social groups considered, serving as an initial validation of the usefulness of the sources in comparative studies of similarities and differences in the aging processes.