The HHB project always aims at extending the boundaries of actual microdata knowledge and techniques! We are now working on grouped data from a collection of Ivorian historical sources testing creative methods to write a brand new history of the well-being of households in francophone Africa. One of our studies is the 1956 household budget survey of Abidjan’s workers directed by Bernard Lonchampt. The survey, with its detailed categorisation of expenditures and wealth of cultural information, is described by the author as “the first of its kind to have been carried out in French Africa”.