The SocFace project brings together archivists, demographers, economists, historians and computer scientists working together to develop technologies for processing large-scale series of historical documents. The project uses automatic handwriting recognition to analyse all the nominal census lists from 1836 to 1936 (i.e. 20 censuses). The project will produce a database of all individuals who lived in France between 1836 and 1936 and will use it to analyse social change over the long term, thereby considerably improving our understanding of French economic and social structures. The other major impact of SocFace will be access to nominative lists for the general public: the information available in the nominative lists will be disseminated in Open Access, allowing anyone to browse freely through hundreds of millions of records.