Social estates

Glossary: that word beside the name

Let us start with what people actually come here for: you saw a word beside a name in a document and want to know what it means. Here are the commonest ones, alphabetically — each explained in a line, with a link onward to the section that covers it in full.

No such mark in the glossary. Try a shorter stem — or write in and we will add it with an explanation.

Why you need this before you search

An archive is organised not by village but by department. Registers were kept by the church, revisions by the treasury chamber, nobility cases by the noble assembly, service records of priests by the consistory. Which of them held your ancestor's papers was decided by his estate.

A mistake here costs not an hour but months: a person spends years going through peasant revisions while the family sits all that time in the files of the noble assembly — or the other way round.

An estate was not for life

The main thing to take from this page: the same family is recorded differently in different decades. Not because it rose or fell, but because the system of registration itself changed — and with it the word in the form.

Over the century and a half covered by Knyha Rodu, the form of our documents changed at least four times. Here is how it looks on the sheets themselves.

Practice

The year the gentry of Miastkivka became odnodvortsi

The review of the gentry is usually written about in general terms. In our case it can be dated exactly — from two consecutive sheets of a clergy return.

Nine households and thirty-six men — in both years. The same people, the same households; what changed was one word in the heading. This is not a new group appearing but an estate being renamed: the parish gentry officially became odnodvortsi.

And straight away a trap: there is no single date

How many there actually were

One more thing visible only over a long run: odnodvortsi were not a mass estate but a stable, closed circle of about a dozen families. In 1845 — 9 households and 78 souls; half a century later, in 1895 — 9½ households and 69 souls. Peasants over the same period more than doubled, from 117 households to 279½.

For the search that is good news: if your ancestor was an odnodvorets, the circle to search is small, and all these families are interlinked by godparenthood and marriage.

And what the law was doing meanwhile

Now a step back. An estate in a record is not a clerk's whim: behind every change of word stands a particular law. These are the ones that touched our villages.

The main thing: law and folio do not agree

Set the dates of the laws against what stands in our books and they diverge by decades — in both directions.

The practical conclusion is simple: date nothing by the law. A decree shows when the state changed the rule; when your clerk picked it up is a separate question, and only your own parish's book answers it. And the other way round: finding an odnodvorets after 1868, do not treat it as an error — it is the inertia of the form.

Odnodvortsi: who they were

The most interesting category for our area — and the commonest reason a family “cannot be found”.

They are the descendants of the petty gentry who, after the partitions of the Commonwealth, could not or did not manage to prove their noble status on paper. The law of 1831 made them an estate of their own — those who lived in villages; the town-dwellers were entered as “citizens of the Western provinces”. Land they mostly had, but rented or held on quit-rent, not owned; serfs they were not and corvée they did not owe — but military recruitment they bore on the same terms as peasants.

That they did not live off corvée is visible in other records too. When the inventory committee took up the town's case in 1851, it noted that Miastkivka was “inhabited by townsfolk, common people and Jews who pay the landlord under contracts” — and closed the case, since there was nothing to regulate.

How many there were by name is shown by the 1859 return: in the section “Въ м. Мястковкѣ” there are eighty-six odnodvortsi, each with a first name, a surname and the size of his holding.

What actually stands in our books

This is no longer theory but a list of what really occurs in the transcribed corpus. The figures come from the register of the Annunciation church of Miastkivka for 1864–1875 (DAViO, f. 904, op. 24, case 24): 1,381 persons.

“Peasant” is not yet an answer

In a parish register the word beside the name is simply крестьянинъ — and so it stands for 490 people out of 1,381. The priest wrote no more: for the church that was enough. In fact at least three different divisions hide behind that one word, and all of them matter to a family.

First division: by draught animals

Estate records set peasants out far more finely than registers do, and divide them into ranks according to what a household could work off. These are not trades or titles: it is a scale of prosperity fixed on paper. Here it is verbatim, from a notarial act covering neighbouring Zelenianka for 1802–1803:

Half a century later the scale is the same, only the words differ. The extract from the inventory of the Novo-Miastkovets estate in the 1850s counts verbatim: “хозяевъ тяглыхъ 172, пѣшихъ или полутяглыхъ 145, огородниковъ 6” — 172 draught-holding households, 145 foot or half-draught, 6 garden-holders who had a garden plot but no field. Lower still came the bobyl, who had no household at all.

Second division: whose peasant

• Manorial — serfs of a private owner. Our villages were exactly that: Miastkivka with its estates belonged to the Koniecpolski family, then the Bielski, the Jaroszyński and finally the Kochubey family
• State peasants — belonging to the treasury rather than to a lord, and noticeably better off in law. Such villages existed in the uyezd but not in our cluster. The law of 1866 gave them their allotments outright, and twice the size of the former manorial ones
• Free cultivators — freed by their lord together with land, for a payment, under the decree of 1803. A rare category: over half a century only a handful used it, so in a document it appears as an exception

Third division: before and after redemption

After 1861 a peasant did not become a proprietor at once. First he was temporarily obligated — personally free, but still owing work to the lord for his allotment. Only after redeeming the land did he become a peasant proprietor.

Here that interval was short: after the January Uprising the Right Bank was moved to compulsory redemption in 1863. So the clergy return of 1895 already has the heading Крестьянъ собственниковъ — 279½ households, that is nearly the whole village.

Townsfolk and the Jewish community

Townsfolk

Miastkivka was a town — with a market, fairs and trading stalls — so a townsfolk stratum is normal here. In the parish registers it is barely visible (five people out of fifteen hundred), but it shows up well in court and notarial files: sales, contracts, suits.

The Jewish community

The Jewish population of the town was counted separately and in other books. This is plain in the revision of 1795: the Christian population of Miastkivka is not in it at all, while the Jewish tale of the town is — folios 541–581. The community's own registers were kept at the synagogue and are not part of this corpus.

The military: a separate line through the whole century

Soldier marks turn up constantly in our books, and they cause the most confusion, because there are several of them and they mean different things.

Hence the double forms, of which the books are full: крестьянинъ-отставной солдатъ — a peasant who served; солдатка однодворка — an odnodvorets woman married to a soldier. The clerk records both standings, because both are in force. Do not reduce such a pair to one word.

By the end of the century the military are a substantial group in the parish: the 1895 return counts 58 households — six times as many as the odnodvortsi.

Marks that are not an estate

Far from every word beside a name is an estate. The clerk might put down a family standing, an occupation, or simply what he knew about the person. Confusion here is expensive: people search for “widow” as a category that never existed.

Family standing

вдова · вдовецъ · дѣвица · жена крестьянина · вдова крестьянина · М. Мясковки крестьянина невѣстка · дочка крест.

This is not an estate but a place in the family. The estate in such entries is the husband's or the father's, and that is what to write down. The marks are not useless, though: a widow could head a household and manage it, so the clerk noted it not out of courtesy but because it carried legal weight.

Occupation and standing

кучеръ · житель · поселенецъ · пришлый

Житель usually just means “resident”: the clerk did not know the estate or did not think it worth putting down. Поселенецъ and пришлый mark an incomer — which is itself a hint that the family should be looked for in another village. Hired hand, coachman, herdsman are occupations with no bearing on estate: a hired hand could be a peasant or a landless odnodvorets alike.

Burlak — and not the one you are thinking of

The trap in the word “гражданинъ”

Abbreviations and question marks

The books are full of abbreviations: кр-нъ, кр-ка, кр., крест. all stand for “peasant”. When searching the texts, try the shortened form too.

Traps

Where the estate leads

The mark that yields most is odnodvorets: behind it there is often a gentry family that failed to file its papers after the partitions. If it did file, a case with register entries for every generation is lying somewhere.

And if there was a clergyman in the family, the road is different altogether: the clergy left a separate and far more detailed body of records.

← Back to the course: step 5, the whole family at once