Version History of the Reconstruction of the Johansen Soundtolregisters Database - 1784-1795.

as reconstructed by dr. George M. Welling - 2008/2009

The original early eighties database of 12 years of the Sound Toll Registers was made under supervision of H.C. Johansen on punched cards. As far as I know now, these cards do longer exist, but the original data have been converted into text files, which were still available from the Danish Data Archive in Odense. For this reconstruction these text files have been used.

    Version 3.02 (sont_reconstructed_v3.02.mdb) - April 2010
    Example of Parameterquery added, which will allow you to see the amount of tax paid by shipmasters from a place of residence for the goods they brought into the Baltic and the goods they exported from the Baltic. (query name is: cargoe_tax_homeplace_skipper)
    Version 3.01 (sont_reconstructed_v3.01.mdb) - August 2009
    Minimal changes:
    1. the codelist for the Nations has been expanded with another field giving the full meaning of the code.
    2. Based on the coding of the original data, every time Bergen appears, it now has been coded as Bergen in Norway. A comparison of the cargoes and the names of the shipmasters makes this the most likely choice. Bang and Korst only mention one appearance of Bergen in the Netherlands in 1687 (and that is probably wrong).
    Third Version (No longer on the server) - August 2009
    Several changes:
    1. There was a strange mistake in the coding of the place Bergen. It was automatically coded as Bergen - Holland, which in most cases was wrong. Two corrections have been made. If the nationality of the shipmaster was Norwegian the coding was changed to Bergen - Norway, if he was Prussian etc. it was changed to Bergen on Rügen
    2. In the example queries of version 2.0 a mistake was made which was pointed out to me by dr. Werner Scheltjens. Actually, I did not count the number of ships coming or going to a particular area, but the number of cargoes. To correct this a new example query was made, based on a sub-query. To do this you first make a query, which results in a normal table. That result-table is then used for the second query. In SQL it can be done at once, but I think you might understand it better if it is done in two steps. The first query uses the SQL statement SELECT DISTINCT, which has the effect that every ship will only be counted once, unless it has cargo from different places (then it will be counted once at all those places, which is technically correct)

    Second Version (No longer on the server) - april 8, 2009
    Minor corrections made to the dbo_steder table in the database: Campveer, which Johanson in accordance with the lists of bang & Korst placed in Scotland, has been identified as a Scottish indication for the place Veere in the Netherlands, which used to have the Scottish wool-staple. The incorrect identification of Zante as Santorini has been corrected to Zakynthos, for which there is more evidence in sources.
    Second Version : (No longer on the server) - april 2009
    In the second version a number of things have been corrected
    • Double codings for the same place or for the same cargo have been standardised
    • Records where the "fra" and "til" field were identical have been checked and corrected on the basis of earlier travels of the captain
    • All place names have been georeferenced: for all places - except categoric names like Baltic Sea - the coordinates have been found using mainly the gazetteer GeoNames and Google Maps. In some cases B.C. Damsteeg, Nieuwe Spiegel der Zeevaart (1942) has been helpful in tracing old spelling variations.
      There is still a small number of place names that could not be identified and help would be appreciated. Thanks for help and suggestions to: Mark de Lannoy, Jan Willem Veluwenkamp, Hanno Brand and Frank Bosmans.
    • A number of example queries have been added to the database, to give an impression of its possibilities.

    First Version (No longer on the server) - march 2009
    Because of serious flaws in the existing Access version of the Johansen Database, a complete reconstruction was made from the original text-files. The DDA-Access database has some serious errors, which made it impossible to work with the data.
    Using Johansen's codebooks and yearly print-outs (provided by dr. H.J. Marker from the Danish Data Archives) most codes used could be identified and translated back to their original meaning. Dr. Erik Tjong Kim Sang (Computing in the Humanities - RUG) helped with the conversion of the text files to delimited files, which could then be imported into the Access Database.
    There is a serious structural difference with the Access Database which the DDA presented, since the "fra" and "till" fields are not restricted to one for every passage, but are connected to the cargoes of every passages, because there are ships that carry goods from X to Y and from W to Z on the same voyage.