  Record linkage is the process of identifying records that refer to the same
entities from several databases. This process is challenging because commonly
no unique entity identifiers are available. Linkage therefore has to rely on
partially identifying attributes, such as names and addresses of people. Recent
years have seen the development of novel techniques for linking data from
diverse application areas, where a major focus has been on linking complex data
that contain records about different types of entities. Advanced approaches
that exploit both the similarities between record attributes as well as the
relationships between entities to identify clusters of matching records have
been developed.
  In this application paper we study the novel problem where rather than
different types of entities we have databases where the same entity can have
different roles, and where these roles change over time. We specifically
develop novel techniques for linking historical birth, death, marriage and
census records with the aim to reconstruct the population covered by these
records over a period of several decades. Our experimental evaluation on real
Scottish data shows that even with advanced linkage techniques that consider
group, relationship, and temporal aspects it is challenging to achieve high
quality linkage from such complex data.
