Nazi schoolteachers led the copying of parish registers onto index cards, and boasted that 30,000 Heimat histories would be written, but the Second World War brought this project to a halt.
Though genealogy in Germany was to take decades to shake off this evil association, some enthusiasts resumed work on the card indexes or typewritten lists left from before the war, and the first new one-place study, now renamed an Ortssippenbuch, appeared in 1956.
As a founder of Historical demography, Henry devised methods that went well beyond mere extraction, and he developed elaborate rules to correct bias and indicate which family histories could be used for different kinds of statistical analysis.
The fact that seven censuses from 1841 to 1901 provide a household-by-household record of the entire population may have reduced the perceived need in Britain for one-place studies compared to the interest they have generated in Germany and France.
In Europe, such records usually date back to about 1600 and include: The internet has stimulated amateur one-place studies, especially in England, since websites allow large volumes of historic material to be published easily.