Colonial Saint-Louis Linked Infant Mortality Sample, 1880-1921

It contains a sample of five birth cohorts born approximately ten years apart, in 1880, 1891, 1904, 1912, and 1920, which are followed until death or age 1. Furthermore, the dataset includes records of stillbirths, which have not yet been analyzed.

To the author's knowledge, this is the first openly accessible individual-level dataset on infant mortality covering a colonial African population. It was constructed based on civil registration records in Saint-Louis, Senegal, whose registers extend back at least to the seventeenth century, allowing the dataset to be expanded to earlier periods. The sources on which this dataset are publicly and digitally available on the website of the Archives Nationales d'Outre Mer, located in Aix-en-Provence, France.