The parish of Porto Salvo 1600-1613 : a demographic study

Abstract

Very little research has been carried out as yet on the Register of Baptisms, marriages and deaths preserved in the archives of the parishes of Malta and Gozo. Yet it is these records that must be studied if a social history of the Maltese Islands is to be written in the future. This study was originally intended as a transcription of entries (on printed forms) of baptisms in the Parish of Porto Salvo between the years 1600 and 1650. However as the transcription of the entries progressed, rather painfully at first, the work became so interesting that on the advice of the tutor we decided to limit the progressive transcription of baptisms to the first fourteen years of the period and so go into more details. However our work is by no means complete. A study of the register of deaths and a similar research on the records in the Parish of St. Paul's must first be carried out before any final conclusion can be drawn. We hope that in this way our study would be more interesting. It certainly proved most intriguing and one thing seemed to lead to another so that one had to be careful to decide when to come to a stop. We have tried, in the time at our disposal to follow all the leads we found and we hope that, in our inexperienced way we have not come to too many wrong conclusions, which are in effect only indications of conclusions which may be drawn from a study of a more extensive period.