Abstract In this article, we describe the record linkage procedure to create a panel from Cape Colony census returns, or opgaafrolle, for 1787–1828, a dataset of 42,354 household-level observations. Based on a subset of manually linked records, we first evaluate statistical models and deterministic algorithms to best identify and match households over time. By using household-level characteristics in the linking process and near-annual data, we are able to create high-quality links for 84% of the dataset. We compare basic analyses on the linked panel dataset to the original cross-sectional data, evaluate the feasibility of the strategy when linking to supplementary sources, and discuss the scalability of our approach to the full Cape panel.

中文翻译：

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在好望角面板记录链接

摘要 在本文中，我们描述了记录链接程序，以从 1787-1828 年的开普殖民地人口普查报告或 opgaafrolle 创建一个面板，该数据集包含 42,354 个家庭级别的观察结果。基于手动链接记录的子集，我们首先评估统计模型和确定性算法，以便随着时间的推移最好地识别和匹配家庭。通过在链接过程中使用家庭级别的特征和接近年度的数据，我们能够为 84% 的数据集创建高质量的链接。我们将链接面板数据集的基本分析与原始横截面数据进行比较，评估链接到补充资源时该策略的可行性，并讨论我们的方法对完整 Cape 面板的可扩展性。