The present article deals with conceptual and methodological questions at the base of a research project of settlement history of Albania in the 20th century. We focus our interest on the identification of all local units and their population. In order to get a complete cover of the country and historical comparability we investigated, as far as possible, the enumeration of all villages of Albania and the number of their inhabitants, but also their localization and administrative status as well as their spatial delimitation. On the one hand, our work refers on an important corpus of official statistics issue of all censuses held in Albania between 1913 and 2011, partially never published. On the other hand, the large use of all available geographical maps dating from different periods up from the 1930s permitted to spatialize the statistical information, to localize demographic information and to compare and to improve the data.