The general aim of this thesis is to analyse and compare archival materials concerning Huguenot and Walloon families, and to carry out a sample analysis of these and whether it is possible to find the cities of origin where they lived until the Nantes Edict was revoked in 1685 and they were forced to flee because of their reformed faith. The selected sources consist primarily of materials from the French departmental archives and materials accessed via the internet as digitalized pictures (.jpg-files) and so on. The descriptive section of this thesis concerns literature about Huguenot and Walloon history, genealogy, and exodus, as well as research into archive and information sciences primarily access and findability. I begin by describing the overall view, to set the stage. Then, I investigate the European archives. Thirdly, I proceed with a time intensive sample analysis of 30 known families from varying places in France, Belgium, Norway, and Sweden and finally, I attempt to clarify the difficulties that arise concerning findability and why those arise. The method is genealogical research on sources accessible by the internet, and it turns out in the conclusion that 50% of the chosen families can be found in their home parishes, even if findability issues often show themselves, both because we’re talking about a religious minority, people fleeing the country, and a large geographic area. It was heartening and surprising however, that my search was successful in finding so many of the 30 families, and interesting to note which areas were easier to search than others. The findability issues are further deepened because the archives’ Internet pages are not optimally designed as their metadata is often insufficient, and the pages furthermore so difficult to navigate since they are both widely different from each other, and because they are not, in the words of Wendy M. Duff, managing to hit the “perfect pivot point” between archiving and usage. Reasons for this include a lack of descriptive data attached to the digitalised files, and because .jpg-files are often not searchable, as observed as well by Catherine Styles. More user research is required in the area of archives, so that better and easier access to these webpages can be guaranteed, especially given varying userbases and their differing needs in searching.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:miun-42519 |
| Date | January 2021 |
| Creators | Thorup Koudal, Johanne Louison |
| Publisher | Mittuniversitetet, Institutionen för informationssystem och –teknologi |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Danish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess, info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess, info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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