In recent years, there has been a marked increase in the demand for global data for research about historical family systems, historical demographic conditions, economic history, or the possible persistence of past cultural phenomena (path dependencies). Projects like IPUMS or NAPP provide already historical census microdata for scholarly research, but these projects are restricted either to the second half of the 20th century or Northwestern Europe. The Mosaic project intends to provide historical census microdata for Continental Europe. The different components of the Mosaic project are presented together with samples of historical census manuscripts. Finally some results of research using Mosaic data are shown.