Revision tales
A household-by-household census of a whole village in a single year: every soul by name, with age and occupation. The fullest snapshot of a community that ever existed — and for our town it does not exist at all.
Below: what this record is and how it is built.
Straight to what survived ↓ Browse the case catalogue →What it is
A revision was a tax census, and that is its whole nature. The state counted not people but souls, on whom the poll tax was due. Such censuses were taken from 1719 to 1858 — ten revisions in all, at intervals of ten to twenty years.
It was compiled not by a priest but by the landowner or his steward, and submitted to the treasury chamber on his own responsibility. Hence the tone of the form: conceal a soul and you will answer for it.
For genealogy this means two things. The good one: everyone should be there, because every soul omitted meant tax unpaid. The bad one: in the earliest revisions women were sometimes not counted at all — they owed no tax.
How the form is built
The 1795 tale opens with a printed blank — the text of the decree itself, identical across the whole governorate:
The unit of account is a cottage
And then comes what people seek this document for. The list is broken up not into paragraphs or numbers but into chałupa — cottages. One cottage, one family, all in a row:
Compare this with a parish register and the difference becomes obvious. A register records an event: born, married, died. A revision records a state of affairs: here is a cottage, here is who lives in it right now, here is everyone's age and how the householder earns his bread.
Revisions work best in pairs. Take two consecutive ones — say 1795 and 1811 — and you will see who was gone in those sixteen years, who was taken as a recruit, who married and set up a cottage of his own, and who ran away. Later forms said so outright, with a reference back to the previous revision.
A book written twice over
The 1795 revision for our uyezd has a feature you would not expect: it is bilingual. Every tale is written out twice — in chancery Cyrillic Russian and in Polish Latin script, in parallel, alternating sheet by sheet. In the Horiachkivka section, 123 Cyrillic sheets are matched by 123 Polish ones.
This is no whim of the scribe but a cross-section of the age: 1795 is the first decade after the partitions, when business was still conducted in both languages. For a reader it is a gift: what you cannot make out in one version reads clearly in the other.
Practice
And now — what survives
Here it has to be said plainly: there are no revision tales for our town. Not “few”, not “hard to find” — none.
What it cost: a great deal, for a result of nothing. All 134 opening pages of the 1854 volume were checked — Miastkivka is not among them. What did turn up was something no one was looking for: the 1859 return.
| What survived | Where |
|---|---|
| 1795 — a list of the Jews of Miastkivka, ff. 541–581 | DAViO, f. 635, op. 1, case 11 |
| 1795 — the full tale of neighbouring Horiachkivka, 248 sheets | the same file |
| 1816 — the tale of the clergy of Olhopil uyezd | DAViO, f. 885, op. 1, case 1 |
| 1854 — the odnodvortsi of Olhopil uyezd | DAKhmO, f. 226, op. 80, case 1043 — not arranged by village, see below |
Look closely at the first line. In the 1795 book Miastkivka is present only through its Jewish tale. The Christian population of the town — peasants, townsfolk, nobles — is not there at all, although neighbouring villages of the same Jaroszyński estate are set out in full: Stavky, Bolhany, Horiachkivka.
In other words, the one tale that would have shown Miastkivka of 1795 household by household is missing. What survived is the tale of the neighbouring village, for the same year, the same owner, from the same book.
Why
Revision tales were kept not in a church but in the treasury chamber — and it was that collection which burned on 10 April 2003 in Kamianets-Podilskyi. The uyezd's early revisions — from the fifth to the eighth (1795–1835) — went with it, and not those of one estate only: the treasury chamber held the tales of all — peasants, townsfolk, odnodvortsi, nobles.
The 1854 tale is a different story
This volume survived — and still did not help. Its tales are drawn up village by village: Dankivka, Dashkivka, Sumivka, Bershad, Stanislavchyk, Starostyntsi. But the villages themselves are grouped into odnodvortsi societies (districts), and the volume is ordered by those. The heading is often double — for instance, “of the 9th district odnodvortsi society… the village of Dmytrivka”.
In practice this means one thing: there is no alphabet in the volume. Villages follow the order of their societies, so the only way to reach the one you want is to go through it in sequence.
We went through all 134 opening sheets of this volume. Among the villages named, Miastkivka is absent. Its odnodvortsi belonged to a different society — which one exactly is unknown, and for now there is nothing to establish it from.
A conclusion there is no point in softening
Among what is available, there are no revision tales for Miastkivka. Not “we haven't got round to it” and not “they must be somewhere” — we followed every line of enquiry, and all of them ended the same way:
- in the 1795 book the town is present only through its Jewish tale
- the early revisions, from the fifth to the eighth, burned with the treasury chamber collection — every estate at once
- the 1854 volume survived, but Miastkivka is not among its villages
This is why revisions are mentioned on this site less often than registers and confession lists. Not because they are worse — on the contrary, they give the household with everyone's age and estate attached. It is simply that for our town none survive.
The one thing that leaves any chance at all is restoration: part of the damaged material is still being recovered, and that work has been going on for years.
Practice
What saves you instead: reports sent to the capital
And here something emerges that changes everything. A governorate did not live unto itself — it reported upwards. Every list, every return submitted to the governor-general in Kyiv or onward to St Petersburg ended up in a different archive. Hundreds of kilometres away. And it burned separately — which is to say, it did not burn at all.
That is exactly what happened with our town. There are no revisions — yet a list of its odnodvortsi, name by name, exists.
Created by the office of the Governor-General of Kyiv, Podolia and Volhynia. The reading has been checked against the original.
This is not a revision. It is an administrative survey: on 24 January 1859 the Olhopil district police captain, acting on an order of 22 November 1858, submits a return “объ однодворцахъ и вольныхъ людяхъ, живущихъ въ помѣщичьихъ имѣніяхъ Ольгопольскаго уѣзда, о количествѣ и качествѣ арендуемой ими земли и количествѣ платимаго ими за землю эту оброка или чинша” — on the odnodvortsi and free people living on landowners' estates, the quantity and quality of the land they rent, and the rent they pay for it.
What it contains
The spread is divided in two. On the left — имя и прозвище · званіе · количество арендуемой земли, name, rank and acreage: for instance, Михаилъ Барилъ однодворецъ 1457 саж. On the right — the rent against each line and the note “никакихъ натурою повинностей не отбываютъ”: no dues rendered in kind.
And above all, its sections run by village. Among them is “Въ м. Мястковкѣ” — thirty-two sheets carrying eighty-six odnodvortsi of the town, each with a given name, a surname and a holding.
Eighty-six families, named one by one, for a period from which not a single revision tale survives. A document never intended as genealogical — it is an account of land and rent — stood in for the lost census.
Checking that it does not lie
The return can be tested against what we have. In neighbouring Popova Hrebla it names the Bukhovetskyi, Zhylavskyi, Shchurovskyi, Vyshnevskyi and Andreievskyi families — and every one of them stands in the confession list of 1846 for the same parish. Two independent sources, different archives, thirteen years apart — and the same composition of the community.
🪤 And a trap right away: registration is not residence
A section of this return is the estate where a person lives and rents land, not the parish they are attached to.
Before drawing conclusions, always look at what the document actually groups by: place of residence, place of registration, parish or estate.
🔑 The rule worth taking away. When a local collection has been destroyed, look not for it but for what was reported upward from it: governors' chancelleries, the governor-generalship, the ministries. Reports, returns, statistics, correspondence — all of it consists of copies made from the same data and deposited in other archives.
They are never as complete as the original. But they exist.
What to do about it
- Check the neighbouring village. Tales were gathered by estate, not by parish. If your village is absent from one book, it may have belonged to another estate — and sit in another file
- Look for the tale of your own social estate separately. Clergy, odnodvortsi and nobles were enumerated in their own revisions, kept separately — which is why they survived unevenly
- In a volume of odnodvortsi, do not search alphabetically. Villages there are grouped by odnodvortsi societies rather than by name, so you have to go through it in sequence
- Do not confuse a revision with a confession list. Both go household by household, both give ages, but a list was kept by the priest every year, a revision by the landowner once a generation. Far more lists survive
- Where no revision survives, other papers partly stand in — household and recruitment lists, governorate reporting, and for the nobility, cases for the confirmation of noble status
The story continues
So the revision falls away: for our town there is none. The direct sources are exhausted — register, confession list and census, all three.
What remains is what survived in other archives: the act books of courts and notaries, where register entries ended up as copies — sometimes from books that no longer exist.