Historians face many difficulties when plumbing the depths of the very dynamic and heterogenic population structures of pre-modern towns, especially because very few sources encompass the various layers of the urban population. In this paper I argue that it is necessary to collect and unlock larger amounts of data in databases, which in turn allow to compose multi-facetted biographies of townspeople and finally pave the way for urban prosopography. That is exactly the aim of the current Who's

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... o in late medieval Brussels database project, which unlocks biographical data on people who worked, lived or stayed in Brussels before 1600. In this paper I will shortly explain the configuration of the database and take it as a case study for balancing some of the methodological issues and present some research perspectives.