Inventaire d'enquêtes Demostaf

Existing sources, such as civil registers, Christian missions, or maternity hospitals, are examined as part of a survey carried out in a rural area of Mali. This papers discusses their contribution to the dating of biographical events. Available documents made it possible to improve data collection, by setting up dating references related to the family, such as lineage calendars that make it possible for respondents to locate events in their own lives in time, and to pinpoint dating landmarks in biographical accounts. They also provided the exact date of a significant number of births. The accuracy of the assessment which is difficult to measure, must be of the order of ± 1 year for events which occurred in the village during the past 40 years. This method is less valid for dating events outside the spatio-temporal field covered by the sources which we analysed. Given the low cost of the operation and its potential contribution to the dating process, this approach might be used in other small-scale detailed surveys, whenever institutional sources are accessible, and conditions exist for the identification of individuals whose names figure on given documents.