Towards Linked Vital Registration Data for Reconstituting Families and Creating Longitudinal Health Histories Oya Beyan 1 , Ciara Breathnach 2 , Sandra Collins 3 , Christophe Debruyne 1,3 , Stefan Decker 1 , Dolores Grant 3 , Rebecca Grant 3 , and Brian Gurrin 2 1 Insight @ NUIG, National University of Ireland Galway, Galway, Ireland {firstname.lastname}@insight-centre.org 2 Department of History, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland {firstname.lastname}@ul.ie 3 Digital Repository of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, Ireland {s.collins,c.debruyne,d.grant,r.grant}@ria.ie Abstract. The Irish Record Linkage 1864-1913 project aims to create a knowledge base containing historical birth-, marriage- and death records encoded into RDF to reconstitute families and create longitudinal health histories. The goal is to interlink the different persons across these records as well as with supplementary datasets that provide additional context. With the help of knowledge engineers who will create the ontologies and set up the platform and the digital archivist who will curate, ingest and maintain the RDF, the historians will be able to analyse reconstructed “virtual” families of Dublin in the 19th and early 20th centuries, allowing them to address questions about the accuracy of officially reported ma- ternal mortality and infant mortality rates. In the longer term, this plat- form will allow researchers to investigate how official historical datasets can contribute to modern-day epidemiological planning. Keywords: birth, death and marriage records; health histories; ontolo- gies and linked data; automatic annotation. 1 The Introduction and Problem Statement To date, the history of medicine and epidemiology in Ireland has focused on medical education and disease administration; the body of the patient remains under-explored [5], [7]. In historiographical terms Irish infant and maternal mor- tality rates have not received due scholarly consideration. This is due to the lim- ited accessibility of vital registration data. Underreporting of births and deaths, for cultural reasons, is a problem in Ireland in the era we are dealing with and currently in India and Sub-Saharan Africa – not to mention the closed societies of the Far east. The ramifications for local and central governance are huge from a public health planning perspective but on a global scale, the WHO has iden- tified Vital Registration under-reporting as a major obstacle to improvements in MMR and IMR and of course disease control. Through our micro study we