Joerg Baten collected a dataset on conscripts in the Kingdom of Bavaria (Southern Germany) which also included the region of Palatinate (today the eastern part of today’s German federal state of Rhineland Pfalz, Southwest Germany). The dataset is not socially selective, because all heights of the male 20.5-year-olds were measured before the decision to recruit a candidate soldier was taken (by drawing lots). Only very few exceptions have to be taken into account, such as priests and migrants who had left the country before the obligatory military medical examination took place. Regionally, all parts of Bavaria are represented (though Southern Bavaria is oversampled and should perhaps obtain smaller weights, if the focus would be on representativeness for Bavaria). The dataset lists the occupations of the candidate’s parents in addition to their own occupation. The parental occupation is even more informative for height research, as height is mostly determined in the first years of life. Occupations are recorded in German, ages are always 20.5, and the first observations were recorded in Bavarian inches before later being changed to centimetres. The decades covered by this dataset are the 1810s to the 1840s, and with 21,000 observations, the dataset is quite large.