66

EASTERN EUROPEAN FAMILY HISTORY RESEARCH

Daniel M. Schlyter3685 Whitewood Court

Salt Lake City, UT 84118

Getting Started

Genealogical research in Eastern Europe isactually easier than American research. This isbecause Europe has a strong tradition of recordkeeping. Civil and ecclesiastical laws required thatall births, maniages, and deaths be recorded. ThusEastern Europe has a far greater pool of resourcesto draw from for research. To successfully doyour research you must answer several Keyquestions. The basic steps of research in EasternEurope are:

~Who was the emigrant ancestor! Do theAmerican part of your research first to learn asmuch about your heritage as possible, includingwho actually came from the old country.~ Where was he from! Because records were kepton a local basis you must determine where yourancestor was from. Some of the best sources to dothis are wbere he settled, including such things asmarriage records, death records, obituaries,natura1ization, etc. Passenger lists of anivals maygive a birthplace. Many eastern Europeans sailedfrom Hamburg. The passenger departure recordsof Hamburg still exist, are indexed and areavailable on microfilm through the Family HistoryLibrary. .~ Where is that! Once you determine wbere yourancestor was from you must verify the spelling,determine where it is now (eastern Europe has hada lot of border cbanges), and where the recordswere kept. Gazetteers are the best way to solvethese problems along with maps. The FamilyHistory Library has an excellent collection ofeastern European gazetteers. The most significantgazetteers for eastern Europe are listed lIt the endof this section.~ Where are the records! This can be thetoughest question of all. For some of the easternEuropean natinns it is very difficult to get accessto the records. Others are accessible by writing orin person. In many cases the records are easilyaccessible on microfilm through the Family

History Library. Available records are listed in theFamily History Library Catalog'" and may be or­dered at the Family History Library or familyhistory centers. Not all records are in the perma­nent collection at the main library. All newlyacquired films must be ordered which cansometimes take several weeks. It is best to callabead (SOl) 240-2334 to order needed films a fewweeks before your visit. When records have notbeen microfilmed you will need to write forinformation. The following pages give detailsabout microfilming and writing for each country.

Sources for Genealogical Research

Europe has many excellent sources for research.Researcbers accustomed to genealogical researcbin the U.S. and Canada often rely heavily oncensus records, land records, wills and probates tobuild a pedigree of their families in NorthAmerica. This is because there often is nothingbetter available. But in Europe the availability ofvital records greatly improves the researchclimate.

Church Records and Civil Registration: Theseare records of births, christenings, marriages,deaths, and burials made by church priests andpastors and government officials. They are excell­ent sources of accurate information on names,dates, and places of births, marriages, and deaths.They are the single, most significant source ofgenealogical information in the eastern Europeancountries and are essential for genealogicalresearch. In most cases civil registration did notbegin until the late 1800s.

The earliest Catholic church records begin in thelate l500s. In general, church records began to bekept on a consistent basis in the mid to late 1600s.By the 1800s laws were enacted in most areasrequiring the churches to keep church records in aspecified format and to make transcripts of therecords for the benefit of the civil government. In

Utah Genealogical A"ociatioll 3rd Annual Confereoce 12-13 April 1996 149

certificate and it takes 2 to 3 months. Write to:

The Embassy of the Hungarian Republic3910 Shoemaker Street N.W.

Washington, D.C. 20008

Slovakia: The Family History Ubrary is presentlymicrofilming the church records of Slovaida. Mostof eastern Slovakia is already filmed and in theFamily History Ubrary Catalog. The collectioncontinues to grow, but until records are listed inthe catalog they are not available. The Slovakarchives also provides a research service which isespecially helpful when the records you needhaven't yet been filmed. All records ofgenealogical value in the Slovakia werenatiooalized. Records from before 1900 are keptin stale regional archives [statnl oblosmi archiry].These records are accessible by writing or inperson. The Ministry of the Interior andEnvironment is responsible for the administrationof archives. Their archival administration

•department processes genealogical researchrequests. 'Ibis same agency can grant permissionfor you to visit the archives in person.

If your ancestor was from Slovakia (formerly byHungary), send your application directly to:

Slovak Ministry of Interior and EnvironmentArchivoa Sprava

Kri!kovl17811 04 Bratislava

SLOVAKIA

The archival administration will arrange forsearches of records (such as birth, marriage, anddeath registers) before 1900. They will send yourrequest for research to the appropriate archive inSlovakia. Qualified archival researchers there willdo the actual research and they will send you areport of the research done. With rare exceptions,the only records available for genealogicalresearch by mail are parish registers [matriky] ofbirths, marriages, and deaths. Other records suchas land records and census records exist and youcan use them for research if you visit the archivesyourself, but they are difficult to access bywriting.

RepUblics of the Former Soviet Union: Theacquisition of records from these republics variesconsiderably from republic to republic. In mostcases the process is proceeding very slowly.

Records filmed by the Family History Ubrary arenot available from these republics until theyappear in the Family History Ubrary Catalog.Look for the specific place for which you needrecords. In some cases it is possible to do researchin person but this is no simple matter and notrecommended unless you have considerableexperience and bave clear assurances that you willbe allowed in the archives. Until such time asrecords have been microfilmed the only practicalways to get information is through one of theseveral genealogical research organizations thathave been formed. The most best known of theseare:

RAGAS· The Russian American GenealogicalArchive Service: 'Ibis organization was formerlywith the National Archives Volunteer service inWashington D.C. It is now an independent self­supporting (for profit) organization. They workwith archivists in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

RAGAS-1929 18th Street· NW

Suite 1112Washington, DC 20009

PROBAND - This is a new self-supportingorganization which assists people in tracingancestry in the former USSR (especially Russia,Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova). For moreinformation contact:

PROBAND-GENEALOGICAL BUREAUul. Bekbtereva 35/2, 128

115516 MoscowRUSSIA

FAST - This is a private firm with connections inUthuama, Latvia and Belarus. Contrary to theimplications of the name this company is not anyfaster than any other research company. Allcompanies that do research in the former SovietUnion are painfully slow because the sources arevery difficult to find and use.

FAST Genealogy Service85lO Wild Olive Drive

Potomac, MD 20854

Other genealogical organizations and firms areemerging and many advertize or are referred to onthe pages of various Jewish genealogicalperiodicals. One of the leading Jewish

Utah GenealogiL'al A'Sociation 3rd Annual Conference 12-13 April 1996 151

geoea1ogical periodicals is:

AvotaynuISS North Washington Avenue

Bergenfield, NJ 07621

Russia: The Russian Republic is vast.Microtilming began several years ago, but it willbe many years before many areas are representedin the collection of the Family ffistory Library.There are as yet DO significant Jewish records inthe collection. Many genealogical researchers areinterested in the records of German colonists whosettled in Russia and the Ukraine. No records areyet available from the Volga. Transcripts of therecords of Protestant communities in the Ukraine(Black Sea and Volhynia), Belarus and the vicinityof St. Petersburg were stored at the LutheranConsistory in St. Petersburg; and these recordshave been microfilmed. Localities and filmnumbers for this set of records are listed in TheLulherans ofRussia; VoL 1 Parish index to thechurchbooks of the Evangelical LulheransConsistory ofSt. Petersburg compiled by TomEdlund, published 1995 by the GermanicGenealogical Society, P.O. Box 16312 St. Paul,Minnesota S5116. Not yet microfilmed.

Belarus: The Family History Library is presentlyacquiring microfilmed records from archives inGrodno and Minsk.

National Archives of Belarus22038 Minsk

wi. Kozlova, 26BELARUS

Central State Historical Archive of Belarus23023 GrodnopI. Lenina, 2

BELARUS

Baltic States: Most records of Estonia have beenmicrofilmed and are available through the FamilyHistory Library. Many Latvian protestant recordshave been filmed. A few Lithuanian records arebeing microfilmed. For records not yet filmedcontact FAST or write directly to the LithuanianState Archives:

Lietuvos Valstybinis ArchyvasGerosios Vilties, 10

20I5 VilniusLITHUANIA

Moldova: Microfilming recently began in thisrepublic which has close cultural ties withRomania. For records not yet filmed try writingdirectly to the Moldovan State Archives:

Central State Archives of Moldova27028 Kishinev

Georgi Assaki Str. 67BMOLDOVA

Ukraine: The Family ffistory Library is presentlyacquiring microfilms of records from Ukraine butthe process will take many years. Presentlyfilming is ongoing at archives in Kiev, L'viv, andChemigov. For records not yet filmed contactRAGAS or write directly to the archives inUkraine.

Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine252601 Kiev - 110

Solomyanskaya wI. 24Ukraine

Central State Historical Archive of Ukraine290008 L'viv

pI. Voiziednannya 3AUKRAINE

State Archive of Transcarpathian Oblast294008 BeregovowI. Geroev 4A

UKRAINE

The Family History Library is also acquiringrecords from the former Soviet republics ofArmenia and Georgia.

Poland: Many church records and civil transcriptsof church records from Poland have beenmicrofilmed. In many cases however, they arefilmed only up through the 1880s. Later recordsand records of communities that are not filmed canbe obtained by writing. You can often getinformation by writing in Polish directly to theCatholic parish [parafia Rzymsko-katolicka] in thetown where your ancestor lived. For non-Catholicsor when you receive no response from the churchyou can write to Polish state archives.

Naczelna Dyreckja Archiw6w PaJlstowychSkr. Poczt. 1005

00-950 WarszawaPOLAND

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152

Poland was partitiooed in 1795 between Russia,Austria, and Germany. The style of recordk:eeping varies considerably in each of these threeareas.

Romania: Some records of German communitiesin Romania have been microfilmed in archives inGermany and Hungary. But no records have beenfilmed in Romanian arohives. There is no specificinformation on where to write in Romania. Theformer government rarely replied to genealogicalquestions, and the new government does not seemmuch better. HopefuUy, the chances for responsewill improve. You can try writing to the localparish [parohle] or to the local civil records office[Qficiul Stlfril Civile]. The foUowing is the newaddress for the state arohives.

Archivelor Statului din RomAniaBucureljti, sect. 5

Bdul Kogllniceanu no. 29ROMANIA

1I111111111ll/l HiItorIc boundaries ofAuIUIo, _ond_from 1116_1811

Former Yugoslavia: Records have beenmicrofilmed only in the republics of Croatia andSlovenia. The process of filming continues inthose republics even now. It is difficult to getgenealogical information from former Yugoslav.republics by mail. You may be able to getinformation by writing to the archive of theappropriate Yugoslav Republic.

CroatiaArhiv Hrvatsk:e

ManlIi6ev trg br. 2141001 Zagreb

CROATIA

SerbiaArhiv Srbije

U1. Kamedfijeva br. 2UOOO Beograd

YUGOSLAVIA

SloveniaArbiv Siovenije

U1. Levstikovtrg br. 361001 Ljubljana

SLOVENIA

c 1995 Daniel M.Schlyter

Utah \.rencalogical Al;jsociatioll 3nl Annual Conference 12-13 April 1996 153

Mitior Gazetteers for Eastern Europe

Vol 8 Tirol und VorarlbergVol 9 BOhmenVol 10MahrenVol l1SchlesienVol 12Ga1izienVol l3BukowinaVol14Dalmatien

1187926 item 51187927 item 1924736 item 1

1187927 item 21187928 item 11187928 item 21187928 item 3

Gazetteer of AustriaGemeinde1exikon der in Reichsrate vertretenen KlJnigreiche und Llinder [Gazetteer of the

crown1ands and territories represented in the imperial council]. Vienna: K.K. StatistischesZentralkommission, 1903-1908. (Family History Library call number: European CollectionRef Q 943.6 ESg; also on microfilm).

1187925 item 2 Vol 1 Niederosterreich1187925 item 3 Vol 2 Oberosterreich1187925 item 4 Vo13 Salzburg1187926 item 1 Vol 4 Steiermark1187926 item 2 Vol 5 Karnten1187926 item 3 Vol 6 Krain1187926 item 4 Vol 7 Kiistenland

Based on the 1900 census. The volume for each province is arranged by district with anindex to both German and local place names. If you do not find the town on the page listedin the index check the footnotes. The parish or synagogue location is not listed in the maintext but is given in an appendix, located between the main text and the index of each volume.The appendix is arranged alphabetically by district and sub-district. The parish andsynagogue are given in the last column: Standort der rom.-kath., gr.-kath. und isr.Matrikelstellen.

Gazetteer of Hungary

Magyarorszag Helysegnevtlira [Gazetteer of Hungary], Janos Dvorz2.k, compo Budapest:"Havi Fiizetek," 1877. (Family History Library call number: European Collection Ref.943.9 ESd; also on microfllm, Vol. I on Film 599564 and Vol. II on Film 973041).

Volume I includes a 610 page index. It lists all place names in alphabetical order. Entries inthe index are followed by the name of the old Hungarian county, and a set of numbers.These numbers refer to the gazetteer entry in Volume II. The first number is the sequentialnumber of the county; the second is the consecutive number of the district; the last is thenumber of the locality.

ref. - Reformatus - Reformedun. - Unitarius - Unitarianizr. - Izraelita - Jewish

Volume II has more details. Volume II is arranged by county and districts. Use the numbersfrom the index to find the entry for your town. Additional names the locality was known byare listed in parentheses. Population figures are given according to religion. The followingabbreviations are used:

rk. - R6mai Katholikus - Roman Catholicgk. - Gorog Katholikus - Greek Catholickg. - Keleti Gorog - Greek Orthodoxago - agostai - Augsburg Evangelical Lutheran

If the village had its own parish church (or synagogue, for Jews), the abbreviation for thereligion will be in boldface capital letters. The diocese will follow, also in boldface type. Ifthe people attended church elsewhere, the abbreviation of the religion will be in lower case.

Utah Genealogical Association 3rd Annual Conference 12-13 April 1996

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The name of the parish location follows the population figure. If a dash (22) follows thepopulation figure, it means members of that religion belong to no particular parish.

Gazette~ of the German Empire

Uetreeht, E., compo Meyers Ons- und Verkehrs- Lexikon des Deutschen ReicJlS [Meyer'sgazetteer and directory of the German Empire). Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut,1912. (Family History Library call number: European Collection Ref. 943 ESmo; alsoon microfilm, Film 496640 - for places A-K, Film 496641 - for places L-Z; also onFiche 6,000,001-6,000029».

Towns are listed alphabetically. This gazetteer is written in the old Gothic script. Thisgazetteer gives the 1871-1918 political jurisdictions and indicates whether the locality had itsown parish or synagogue. The following abbreviations are used:

Evangelical parish: EvPfk. Catholic parish: KPfk. Jewish synagogue: Syn.

Gazetteer or Prussia

Gemeindelexikonjar das KlJnigreich Preussen [Gazetteer for the Kingdom of Prussia).Berlin: Verlag des Koniglichen statistischen Landesamts, 1907-1909. (Family HistoryLibrary call number: European Collection Ref 943 ESkp; also on microfilms listedbelow).

Vol 1 Ostpreussen (Film 1186701 item 3)Vol 2 Westpreussen(Film 1186701 item 4)Vol 3 Brandenburg(Film 806635 item 1)

Vol 4 PommernVol 5 PosenVol 6 Schlesien

(Film 806634 item 4)(Film 806635 item 3)(Film 806633 item 4)

.Each volume has an index at the end listing in alphabetical order all localities in theprovince. In the index, there are two numbers given after each place-name. The first numberrefers to the "Kreis" (district) to which the locality belonged. These numbers can be found atthe top of the page in the body of the book. The second number refers to the town. Thus "2117" refers to the 17th town listed in district 21. The parish is given in the columns marked as"Kirchspiel"; "Evangelisch" (Lutheran) in column 25 and "Katolisch" (Catholic) in column26. Note: If the town in question is not listed in column two, refer to the footnotes in thegazetteer.

Gazetteer of the Russian Empire

Sulimierski, Filip, ed. Slownik Geograjicmy Kr61estwa Polskiego i Innych Kraj6wSlowiatiskich [Geographical dictionary of the Kingdom of Poland and other Slaviccountries]. 15 Vol. Warsaw: Sulimierski i Walewski, 1880-1902. (Family HistoryLibrary call number: European Collection 943.8 ESc; also on microfilm).

Utah Genealogical Association 3rd Annual Conference 12-13 April 1996 155

Film numbers are as follows:

vol. 11vol. 12vol. 13vol. 14vol. 15

Sochaczew-Szlurbowska WolaSzlurpkiszki-WarlynkaWarmbrunn-WorowoWorowo-!yZynAbabi-Januszowo(addendum)

vol. 15 Januszpol-Sniatyn(addendum)

Arranged alphabetically with text in Polish.

920,967920,968920,969920,970920,971

Aa-DerenecznaDerenek-GiackHaag-Kc:pyKl:S-KutnoKutowa-MalczyceMalczyee-NetrebaNetreba-Perepiat 920,972Perepiatycha-PoiajgciePotajkie-RukszeniceRukszeniee-Sochaczew

vol. 1vol. 2vol. 3vol. 4vol. 5vol. 6vol. 7vol. 8vol. 9vol. 10

920,957920,958920,959920,960920,961920,962920,963920,964920,965920,966

Poland

BysUZycki, Tadeusz. Skorowidz Miejscowosci Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej [Listing of Localitiesof the Polish Republic]. Przemy§l: Wydawnictwa ksiaznicy naukowej, 1934. (FamilyHistory Library book 943.8 ESsm; also on microfilm, Film 1343868).

Gazetteer of the early repUblic of Poland from 1918 to 1939. Arranged alphabetically withinfonnation in columns. Localities are listed alphabetically down the page in the firstcolumn. Township, district, province (voivodship), post office, railway station, bus station,local and regional courts, and Christian parish for the locality are listed in successivecolumns to the right. The nearest synagogue is not listed.

Yugoslavia

lmenik mlsta u Jugoslaviji [place names in Yugoslavia]. Beograd: Novinska UstanovaSluZbeni List SFRJ, 1972 (Family History Library call number: 949.7 ESim, also onmicrofiche, Fiche no. 6053513)

From pages 45 to 452 all Yugoslav localities are listed alphabetically down the page in thefirst column. District, republic, and post office, are listed in successive columns to the right.Post office towns are listed with postal codes on pages 456-473.

UGA Genealogical Conference 1996

Utah Genealogical Association 3rd Annual Conference 12-13 April 1996156

LIFE IN THE BALTIC STATES BEFORE THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Andrejs Plakans

Born in Latvia. Resides in Ames, Iowa. Assistant professor of history, Iowa StateUniversity. Ph.D. (history), Harvard University. Author, lecturer.

TIlE RlJSSIAN EMPIRE

On a map of eighteenth century Europe oureyes move eastward from England andFrance across the patchwork quilt thatwas Germany, and eventually encounter animmense and uniformly colored arealabeled "The Russian Empire." Normallyonly European Russia would be depicted onsuch a map, for the Asian territory ofthe empire was too vast to be included.In the eighteenth century the empire wasstill expanding, and its European acqui­sitiona included the pf"vinces of theeastern Baltic littoral. The provincesof Livlaiid and Estla.!!d were obtained atthe beginning of the century, when Peterthe Great triumphed over Sweden. Laterin the century, as part of the territor­ial settlement accompanying the ThirdPartition of Poland, Catherine the Greatadded the province of KurJ.ang (1795) •Thus, by the end of the l790s Russia hadsucceeded in establishing itseU as thedominant power in northeastern Europe,replacing Sweden; and the inhabitants ofthe Baltic Provinces--nobles, burghers,and peasants ali1<e-were now obliged toaccept the sovereignty of a new ruler.The historical documents of the areawould reflect these changes. The studentof Baltic history would now need to beable to read Russian ~\¥1&e sources, inaddition to the Latin, German, Swedish,Danish, and Polish that are needed tounderstand Baltic historical events priorto the triumph of Russian hegemony.

TIlE BALTIC GERMANS

In spi te of the change of sovereignrulers, certain things remained unalteredin the Baltic region, and one of these

was the elites--the landowning nobles andthe city-dwelling burghers--who were pri­marily German speaking. The BalticGermans (Baltendeutsche) had arrived inthe area during the medieval centuries invarious capacities: as representativesof the medieval church, which wanted toChristianize the remaining "pagans" ofthe European continent through the so­called Baltic Crusade in the fourteenthcentury; as military adventurers who wentwherever warfare and booty were to befound; as land-hungry younger sons ofGerman nobles who were unable to acquireproperty in the lands of their birth; andas merchants who wanted to include theeastern Baltic littoral in the tradingarea ~ing built up by the HanseaticLeague. Having arrived, most of themstayed to form over the centuries theupper layers of Baltic society, whichwere still very much in control by thetime the area joined the Russian Empire.In due course they were joined by hun­dreds of other people migrating north­eastward from Central Europe: estatefunctionaries, artisans, some peasants,some clergy, and tutors for the childrenof noble families. In spite of thissubstantial immigration, the Germanspeakers of the Baltic area remained nomore than about 5 to 6 percent of thetotal population, the great bulk of theBaltic inhabitants being the successorsof the original Latvian and Estonianpopulations. The Baltic Germans exer­cised their dominance through the corpor­ations of the nobility (Ritterschaften),the Lutheran Church after the ProtestantReformation, and the guilds in the towns;as well as through the recognition theywere given as the mainstays of local andregional government by the succession ofmonarchs in Warsaw, Stockholm, Ibscow,

533/Plakans

and St. Petersburg. Not surprisingly,the Baltic Germans eventually came tothink of themselves as much "native" tothe regions as the original Latvian andEstonian inhabitants of it. To theextent that they ....re indeed the princi­pal figures of local and regional admini­stration' they kept their records in .thelanguage which they themselves spoke.The historical records left by the admin­istrators of landed estates, tradesmenand merchants in the t01iilllS, and the courtsystan are therefore mostly in the Germanlanguage.

Having consolidated this power locally,the Baltic Germans were not willing tosurrender it to the distant monarchs whoperiodically gained ascendancy over theBaltic area. In the seventeenth century,when Sweden possessed the region, theVasa dynasty had a hard time exlj'ndingits authority to the local level. Therelations between the Swedish monarchacross the Baltic Sea and the nobilitiesin the Baltic had to be carried onthrough a series of compromises. WhenPeter the Great defeated Sweden in theGreat Northern War, he found that inorder to secure the loyalty of the Balticnobles in Livland and Estland, he had toguarantee the continuation of their pri­vileges to rule the Baltic undisturbed.When the last of the provinces-Kurland­became part of Russia in 1795 in thepartitions of Poland, the Kurlandicnobility d"""",ded similar privileges, andTsar Paul had to agree to than. Thus, bythe end of the eighteenth century, interms of the distribution of power, theBaltic German situation had not changeddramatically: they were, to be sure, nowthe loyal subjects of the Russian tsarrather than of the Swedish king, buttheir loyalty could be counted on only aslong as the Russian tsar did not try tointroduce too many Imperial officialsinto the Baltic area or try to interferein the affairs of local administration.From the Imperial government's viewpoint,this was hardly a satisfactory situation,but the Russian government was at thispoint not willing to undertatuz. militarychallenges to regional nobles. In theabsence of regional officials directly

2

responsible to the crown's wishes, St.Petersburg had to rely on the localnobilities to govern, to collect taxes,and to provide military assistance intimes of need. There was also the factthat many Baltic nobles became officialsin St. Petersburg and officers in theImperial Army, and thus were well placedto fight agains t efforts to diminishtheir authority in the Baltic area.Then, too, the mercantile sector of theBaltic economy was well developed,creating a substantial proportion of thetrade moving across the borders of theempire. Tranquility in this region wouldensure its economic prosperity.

SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND NATIONALITIES

The social structure in each of theBaltic provinces, as in the anpire and inthe rest of Europe, was conceived of bycontemporaries as consisting not ofsocial classes, as we use the term, butof a hierarchy of social orders (orStllnde) each of which was defined as aseparate entity in the law, and indeedhad laws applicable only to its members.The main orders were the nobles(Adelstand), burghers (Biirgherstand), andpeasants (Bauernstand). Each resident inthe Baltic was identified as belonging toone order or another. Usually manbershipwas acquired through birth; that is, aperson was a member of the order to whichhis parents belonged; and throughout anindividual's lifetime, privileges,rights, responsibilities, and generallylife opportunities were· defined by theposit.ion of that order in the hierarchyof orders. This society was thereforeradically inegalitarian. This does notmean that the population was entirelyfrozen into place, but it did mean thatmovanent upwards in the social orders(social mobility) was minimal. Therewere individual exceptions to thisgeneral rule, but these tended to bestatistically insignificant.

One of the interesting aspects of sociallife in the Baltic was that the linedemarcating the higher orders (nobilitiesand the burghers) from lower order (the

533/Plakans

peasants) coincided also with the princi­pal nationality division within thepopulation. The upper orders were madeup almost entirely of German speakers,whereas the lowest social order--thepeasantry--was made up almost entirely ofeither Latvian speakers or Est~ian

speakers, depending on the province. InKurland, the peasantry was almost en­tirely Latvian; in Livland, the peasantrywas Estonian in the north and Latvian inthe south; and in Estland, it was en­tirely Estonian. In all cases, it wasthe peasantry that made up the vast bulkof a provincial population, JOOre than 90percent; also, in all three provinces inthe eighteenth century very few Latvianor E~tonian speaking individuals wereliving in the cities and towns. It was asituation in which the social structure(as defined through the idea of orders)had as its internal boundaries not onlythe different laws that regulated thelife of each order, but also the nation­ality division which separated thepeasantries from the rest of the membersof the social hierarchy. By contrast, inRussia proper, or, for that matter inWestern Europe, where a society based onorders also existed, social structure didnot include the problem of nationalitydivisions; there, the nobilities,burghers, and peasants generally spokethe same language and could think ofthemselves as having originated from thessme earlier population.

When we speak of "nationality" in theeighteenth century, we must be verycareful not to read too much into thatword. At that time, nationality dif­ferences normally did not mean much morethan language differences. The philos­ophy of nationalism was still a matter ofthe future. Germans--the Georges ofHannover--occupied the throne of England;Catherine the Great of Russia was herselfa German; and the idea that a particularnationality group, however defined,should have its own state and should begoverned by persons from within its ownranks had not yet taken hold of theEuropean mind. The Baltic peoples wereconscious of linguistic differences,of course, but it is not likely that they

3

held them to be of major significance.Thus, in the eighteenth century member­ship in a nationality group did not yetentail a national consciousness. Ifthere was friction between Germanspeakers, on the one hand, and theEstonian and Latvian speakers on theother, it grew out of the fact that theformer were estate owners, nobles, andmerchants, and the latter highly vulner­able peasants, and less out of the cir­cUlllstanceg that each spoke a differentlanguage. The life of peasants waslocally orient.ed and they normally de­fined their "world" in terms of thelanded estate in which they and theirforefathers had lived. The idea that allresidents of the Baltic provinces whospoke Latvian, for instance, should tmnkof themselves in terms of a national com­munity with common interests would notenter the Baltic area until the secondhalf of the nineteenth century. At thessme time, however, the language commun­ities were a social fact, and their dis­tribution in the way I have mentioned animportant characteristic of the socialstructure.

SERFDOM

In addition to being peasants, that is,agriculturalists and farmers, the Latvianand Estonian speakers of the Baltic pro­vinces were also serfs. The institutionof serfdom had nearly disappeared in thewestern parts of Europe, and the peasantsof England, France, and the western partsof Germany were legally free to movewhere they pleased, not being bound toany particular piece of land or to a par­ticular person. In the same centurieswhen serfdom had disappeared from westernEurope, however, it had experienced a re­surgence in the east, and by the end ofthe eighteenth century, the institutionof serfdom w"f a major social fact of therural areas. Technically speaking, tobe classified as a serf (erbuntertan;leibeigener), meant either that one wasbound to live on a particular peasantholding in a particular estate, or,alternately, that one was the serf of aparticular landowner and therfore bound

533/Plakans

to live where that landowner commanded.Moreover, serf status had become her­ediatry; SO that rural people were notonly born into a particular social order(the peasantry), but also into a parti­cular subgroup of a social order, theenserfed peasantry. There were freepeasants even in the Bal tic, but theywere relatively few in number. By theend of the eighteenth century, to be apeasant in the Baltic provinces meantthat one was also a serf, and as I havementioned, these peasant-serfs werenearly always either Latvian or Estonianspeakers, depending on the province.

Conditions of serfdom varied greatly fromprovince to province and between regionswithin Russia, and there is very littleutility in thinking of all peasant-serfsas living in the same kind of undifferen­tiated misery. Nonetheless the peasant­serfs of the Baltic were subject to ahost of restrictions and obligationswhich, in the western part of Europe,""uld have been thought intolerable andin England, prob~ly judged to be viola­tions of rights. Apart from the l:lmi­tation on movement, peasant-serfs werealso obligated to yield up part of theircrop to the estate owner, and part oftheir time to ""rlung that section of theestate's fields which was set aside forthe landowner himself~ Peasant-serfsalso performed other labor duties, fromrepairing roads to hauling goods tomarket. In addition, they were subjectto the authority of the landowner sittingas judge in the manorial court, and torulings that included corporal punish­ment. In return, the peasant-serf haduse rights to a particular piece of theestate (a holding) and certain commonrights of grazing. lie also depended onthe landowner to champion him against theoutside world, whether against invadingenemies or usurpations practiced byneighboring landowners. No one wouldargue that this system of rights andobligations, as experienced by thepeasant-serf, ensured a principle ofequality; but, at the same time, fear ofcondemnation by their peers kept mostlandowners from practicing the worstabuses. Not infrequently, serfs fled to

4

escape life under a particularly harshlandowner.

FAMILY LIFE OF SERFS

Family life of peasants was conducted inthe context of the serf estate, and theregulations governing the estatenaturally impinged upon family life aswelL One regulation which appears tohave had considerable impact was therestriction on movement, which serfscould undertake only with the expresspermission of the landowner. In practicethis restriction could not be enforcedquite as stringently as it was conceivedof in the law, since landowners did nothave a large enough police force to keepa tight control over everybody. Moreoverthere was an advantage to allowing fe­males to marry out, in exchange for somekind of payment; and males to marry in,since in this arrangement the es tate.gained additional labor. The subject oflocal movements under these conditionshas not been studied very well, but thestudies that have been done suggest thatin the Baltic area, as elsewhere in pre­industrial Europe, we should not conceiveof the peasant populations as totallyiJlInobilized. Even if peasants did notmove in large numbers in and out of theestate there was considerable movementwithin the estate. In a study of asingle estate between the years 1797 and1811 it was found that only about 22percent of the peasants of the firstcensus who were alive by the second werestill living in the farmst~ in whichthey had been found in 1797. While itwas probably true that most peasants diedwithin the estate into which they hadbeen born, it was not necessarily truethat they always lived in the same·farmstead.

Studies have shown that peasant-serfstried to ensure that a holding wouldremain in the same family over genera­tions. The farmstead, to which a plot ofland was attached, was the smallestsubunit in the estate economy. Thelandowner depended upon the farms tead andits inhabitants not only for the upkeep

533/Plakans

of the farmstead's lands but also for asupply of labor to work the landowner'sland, the demesne. In the Baltic itappears that farmsteads were almostpermanent institutions, which, oncebuilt, continued to house generationafter generation of peasants with littlechange in the physical premises. MJre­over, landowners were apparently unwill­ing to allow peasants to build additionalstructures, so that new marriages did notnecessarily mean the creation of newfarmsteads. What was more likely wasthat if he could not find an open farm­stead to take over, he remained livingwith his father, or with his marriedbrother who had taken over. This meantthat the proportion of farmsteads onwhich joint families of various kindscould be found was very large, far largerthan could hJ:o found in western Europeanrural areas. The different combina­tions of related married couples who wereliving in a single farmstead was quitegreat, and the varieties could includenot only the usual "parent-marriedoffspring" and "married brother" combina­tions, but also sons-in-law, and marriedsisters co-residing with marriedbrothers. The discussion of family typesin the Baltic, therefore, involves adiscussion of the joint family system asa significant fact of family life.

Relatively restricted migration acrossestate boundaries also meant that Balticpeasants were likely to encounter withinthe es tate of their residence largenumbers of relatives beyond those in­cluded in their families of birth andmarriage. Census records show that therelatives who were living with anindividual in a farmstead were not theonly important ones he had in the entirecommunity; and consequently, for theBaltic area, the old observation that "inthis village all persons are related, "while not entirely true, was also notentirely erroneous. This does not mean,of course, that the entire populationlived in peace and harmony; but it doessuggest that there was. a kinship basisfor treating incomers and perhaps eventhe landowner as "outsiders." The kin­ship rules in these Baltic communities

5

appear to have been patrilineal, empha­sizing the father's line where inheri­tance was concerned, and bilateral,recruiting relatives from both si11.s, asfar as co-residence was concerned.

One interesting aspect of family life wasthat in spite of a household structurewhich resembled that of other easternEuropean areas, the marriage patternswere definitely more like those in Swedenand other Scandinavian countries thanlike £2e Russian marriage patterns to theeast. The Baltic peasants married at alater age than did Russian peasants--pro­bably in their early twenties rather thanin their late teens-and there was ahigher proportion of peasants in theBaltic who never married at all. This islikely to have meant a somewhat lowerfertility rate in this area, even though.that matter has not been thoroughlystudied. What accounts for this unusualpattern of relatively high ages at firstmarriage is not very clear. The land­owners had every interest in seeing to itthat the female serfs they owned marriedas early as possible, so that the numberof children born on the estate and thenumber likely to survive would be higher.In the serf estates for Russia, peasantfathers could be fined if their daughtershad not yet married by age eighteen ornineteen. Yet in the Baltic this kind ofinterference was apparently not regularif it existed at all. Apparently,peasant families were freer to exercisechoice in the matter, and the statisticsshow very few women or men in the marriedstate before their twentieth year. Onefactor may have been the shortage offarmsteads mentioned earlier. If theestate had allowed a new farmstead to bebuHt and new holdings to be claimed byeach newly married couple, the chances ofa young couple being able to manage onits own might have been greater. As itwas, however, very young couples had tolive with their ·parents, or with marriedolder siblings, since, judging by statis­tics, there appears to have been a pro­hibition against farmstead heads who wereyounger than twenty. It is thereforepossible that peasant parents did notgive their offspring permission to marry

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early, knowing full ""U that that wouldmean either new mouths to feed in theirown farmsteads or that the young couplewould have to start their married life asfarmhands in the farmsteads of otherpeasants.

CHANGING CONDITIONS

At the end of the eighteenth century,certain changes in Baltic areas began topoint toward the alteration of theselong-standing arrangements and patterns.One very important change was a newattitude by landowners toward their land:they had started to think of theirproperties less in terms of self-suffi­ciency and more in terms of profit, sincethe grain they grew could be and wasexported to a wider foreign market.Landowners were always short of capital,however, since their wealth was fixedrather than fluid; consequently, manyestates ""re mortgaged and remortgageduntil the nobility as a whole, in spiteof the visible:J-uxuries it enjoyed, wasin heavy debt. Along this same line,efforts ""re made to alter the tradi­tional settlement patterns on the land,so as to enlarge the arable and to makeit more efficient for yielding a largercrop. One way of doing this was forlandowners to reduce the number ofpeasant holdings by adding the holding tothe demesne if it feU vacant, by forcingthe current occupant to leave and becanea hired hand on another holding, or byshifting peasant families to otherestates which the landholder owned. 'Thelong-term result of these changes,coupled with population growth, was anincrease in the number of entirely land­less peasant-serfs, and an expansion inthe number ()f persons living on thosefarmsteads which continued to exist. 'Theaverage number of peasants per farmsteadby the end of the eighteenth century hadrisen to about fifteen persons. 'Thelandowner still depended on these serfsfor labor, but increasingly peasants wereno longer tied to particular holdings andresided on the estate either in thedirect employ, for wages, of the owner orin employ of other wealthier peasants.

6

'There ""re both advantages and disadvan­tages for the landowner in this situa­tion. He still had a labor force, it istrue, but at the same time there haddeveloped an unhealthy situation of over­crowding and possibly also a force ofsurplus labor. Moreover, the landownerwas still responsible in the eyes ofregional law, and in the eyes of hispeers, for seeing to it that his serfswere not starving and at least had aplace to live.

ABOLITION OF SERFDOM

One way of changing this situation was toabolish serfdom and thus to transform atone stroke the entire relationship thatexisted between landowners and peasants.'This was, of course, a very radical move,and few landowners wanted to take sodramatic a step, especially since itcould not be directly proven that itwould indeed benefit them materially.Abolition conjured up images of vastnumbers of landless persons wanderingabout the countryside, ripe for variouskinds of unrest. On the other hand, now,in the early nineteenth century, withTsar Alexander I on the Russian throne,abolition of serfdom was being discussedfor the empire as a whole, and thereforeit began to seem much less a radicalidea. And, indeed, several decades ofdiscussion and deliberation eventuallyled to the abolition of serfdan in theBaltic provinces--Kurland, Livland andEstland-in the period fran 1817 to 1820,forty years earlier l~han in the rest ofthe Russian Empire. 'The reform wascarried out in a way that most clearlybenefited landowners and reduced thepossibility of major social dislocation.First of all, as canpensation for losinga labor force, the nobility's ownershipof all land was confirmed. 'Thus evenafter emancipation, the peasants were notmuch more capable of owning agriculturalreal estate than they had been before.Ownership for peasants was possible intheory in individual instances, but notas a characteristic of the entire peasantorder. Also, the transformation of serfsinto freemen was carried out for segments

533/Plakans

of the entire serf population at a timein the expectation that this would avoidthe excesses of rural dislocation. As aconsequence of emancipation, it is true,the peasants became free subjects of theTsar; on the other hand, since for mstof them it was materially impossible toleave the areas in which they had beenborn, they occupied their holdings now onthe basis of labor rents. That is, theintroduction of money rent was very slowin caning, since the landowners wanted topreserve as much of the labor force asthey had had befor the emancipation. Inpractical terms, this meant that the vastmajority of the Latvian and Estonianspeaking peasants were still bound by thelabor obligations of the property theynow rented, but now this relationship wasa fixed legal one, rather than beingdefined by custom, and the landownercould be brought into court if he triedto violate it. The landowners sought toimprove their positions in ot\'5 ways inthe emancipation document. Localaffairs were now to be run by the peasantcommunity itself; whatever funds wereneeded for setting up poorhouses,orphanages, storehouses for times offamine and so forth had to be establishedand run by the peasant community. Thelandowner could not be obligated anylonger to help peasants in times ofhardship, nor to aid if they neededprotection. The road system had to bepaid for by the community; and such taxesas were owed to the government were thecommunity's responsibility. Thus thelandowner had extricated himself fran ahost of obligations which had been partof his role before the emancipationdecrees. Freedom had been bought forquite a heavy price.

CHANGING SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND NATIONALISM

In spite of the hardships that the newsituation created for the peasants, thereis no doubt that the general atmosphereof the Baltic area had been altered toprovide them with new opportunities. Itis fran the l830s, by which time theemancipation process had concluded, thatwe begin to date the appearance of

7

Latvian and Estonian speakers in variousurban and rural occupations and positionsin which such people had never been foundbefore. These positions were of coursestill low as far as income and prestigewere concerned, but their existencecannot be denied. There also appears tohave taken place a change in attitudeamong some Baltic Germans toward the pea­sant populations over which they stillhad such power and control. This periodsaw the founding of learned societieswhich had as their main objective thestudy of Latvian and Estonian folk cul­ture, and these were responsible forestablishing the first ne'fgpaper (1821)in the Latvian language. Generallysuch efforts were still in the old tradi­tion of the Baltic German clergy and menof letters looking after the education ofthe masses, an obligation that had beentaken very seriously, especially amongthe Protestant clergy for centuries be­fore this. But at the same time theseefforts came to involve an increasinglylarger number (though still small inabsolute terms) of sons of Latvian pea­sants, as these received education at thecommunity level and became capable ofserving as rural school teachers andminor journalists. They could not aspireto much mre than this at the manent, buteven this limited mbiliry carried theminto positions in the provinces whichLatvians and Estonians had not occupiedbefore. The end result of this processwas that by the 1850s there began toappear calls among the Latvians andEstonians for a "national awakening," andfor a wholesale restructuring of therelationships between Baltic Germans andthe Latvian and Estonian speaking popu­lations. Nationalism had cane to theBaltic fran the west, and it had touchedthe imaginations of these first few gen­erations of pe'l~ant offspring in adramatic fashion.

Above all, the "national awakening" meantthat from this point onward, in the totalcorpus of written historical records inthe Baltic, there would be a small butever increasing segment which was beingproduced by the traditional underc1assesand would reflect their point of view.

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Official records, of course, continued tobe generated by Baltic German and Russianfunctionaries, in their capacity ofadministrators of the provinces. Butbelletristic literature was anothermatter. Initially, this new literaturewas experimental since the languages-­Lativan and Estonian-in which it wasexpressed fell short of being full­fledged literary Latvian and Estonianlanguages. They had to be sharpened asIiterary tools, since they lacked avocabulary to discuss the Baltic world ofthe nineteenth century and were full ofall sorts of Germanisms and Russianismsas a result of the fact that the Latvianand Estonian authors frequently spokeGerman and Russian at home.

NATIVE LANGUAGE LITERATURE

The new writing was of two distincttypes. There was, first, the works whichwere openly polemical and challenged on abroad front the hegenony of the BalticGermans over the cultural life of theBaltic, as well as their control ofpolitical and economic institutions.This literature took the form of news­papers, such as Peterburgas avizes, andlengthy examinatio~of the conditio.ns ofthe Baltic area. The Latvian andEstonian writers could not be asthoroughly critical of the Baltic Germansas they wished to be, since all publica­tions had to be approved by govermnentcensors, and any attacks which were tooharsh would be forbidden as "subversive."Thus political and econcmic commentarywas always walking a tightrope: it hadto be acceptable to the crown yet at thesame time critical enough of BalticGerman ways to accomplish its purpose ofraising the consciousness of the Latvianand Estonian masses. It should be notedthat in these decades Latvian andEstonian nationalists were not callingfor total control over Baltic institu­tions; instead, they asked for a sharingof power between themselves and theBaltic Germans. Moreover, they were notseparatists either and continued tobelieve that a greater share in politicalcontrol of the Baltic could be obtainedwhile the provinces stayed as constituent

8

parts of the Russian Empire. To a greatextent, these attitudes coincide withthose of a segment of Russian intellect­ual opinion-namely, Slavophilism--whichheld that the goverrnnent should not allownon-Russian minorities to dominate anypart of the Empire. Consequently, theLatvian, and to a lesser extent, theEstonian nationalists received aid fromjournalists and other officials in St.Petersburg and Moscow. On the otherhand, Baltic German influence in officialcircles remained strong as well, so thatthe Baltic nationalists could not reallycount on absolutely unqualified supportfrom these quarters in their strugglesfor cultural and econcmic autonomy. Thecrown was, of course, concerned lestLatvian and Estonian nationalism lead tosubversion and create in the Baltic areaa situation like in Poland, where nation­alists attitudes led to the insurrectionin 1863. In such a context, for a periodof twenty years or so, the Latvian andEstonian nationalists were able to launchand institutionalize a nationalisticmovement which, once begun, showed nosigns of losing support either in themasses of the people or among the ever-­expanding ranks of the educated in thetwo nationality groups.

This institutionalization of nationalismtook the form of the establishment ofsocieties, such af9 the Riga LatvianAssociation (1868) , which meant thatalongside the German language historicalrecords kept by the official provincialinstitutions there would be other recordswhich reflected the deliberations andproblems of the La tvian and Es toniannational communities. In addition toassociations, there were also newspaperswhich, after the first run of Peters­burgas aVizes, continued to appear withconsiderable regularity. Besides theseLatvian and Estonian language materials,there also existed a considerable body ofwritings by Latvian and Estonian nation­alists in Russian and German, publishedin the periodical presses of theselanguages. The character of this earlywriting waS hardly scholarly, sinceneither of the two nationality groupswere represented in the scholarly

533/Plakans

disciplines in the Baltic area. But itdid represent a new viewpoint and there­fore a new type of historical source.

Much more numerous were Latvian andEstonian belletristic writings, since inthe area of fictional literature censor­ship was not as heavy and the BalticGermans did not perceive such activitiesas threatening their control over theBaltic. Consequently Latvian andEstonian writers were relatively free toexperiment in a wide range of genres,starting with poetry, and extending overnovels, novellas, short stories, and dra­matic literature. The overall guidingconcern of these writers was to have a"national literature" and this meant, intheir thinking, that there should beLatvian and Estonian language materialsavailable in all literary genres. Theprincipal characteristic of the writingsof the 1850s and 1860s was its experi­mental nature, since the writers of thisperiod ""re still feeling their way inzathis kind of intellectual activity.Moreover, the total amount of this writ­ing was still relatively small; noLatvian and Estonian writer could make aliving by writing, and therefore most ofthem had to write in their spare time asthey carried on their regular profes­sions, usually schoolteaching. Nonethe­less, as in the case of the polemic lit­erature, the total number of belletristicworks continued to grow. The greatestsuccess came in the writing of novels,which were written in a realistic veinand sought to portray the Latvian coun­tryside in a period of rapid change.•Some of this writing continued to have adidactic purpose: it explicitly soughtto educate its readership not only in theuse of the Latvian language but also inthe thought that the Latvian dimension oflife was worthy of being written about.It was not until the 1890s that Latvianand Estonian belletristic literature lostthis didactic content and was writtenprimarily by reference to aesthetic con­siderations •

FOLKLORE

One major question the Latvian and

9

Estonian nationalists faced was how toview the oral traditions of the twopeoples. If, as they claimed, a new eraof the imagination had begun, what was tobe the status of the older creativetraditions? Nationalist theory said thatthe oral tradition was an outpouring ofthe "national soul" of the people andtherefore constituted a basis on whichall written literature had to be built.But the nationalists eventually dis­covered that the oral tradition could notreally serve these goals because of itsrelatively restricted forms and thealmost entirely rural basis of itscontent. Nonetheless the oral traditionwas considered to be extremely valuable,and therefore a major effort was launchedby both Latvians and Estonians to recordas IDUch of it as was still alive andbeing recited. The collection effortturned out to require far more time thanwas thought, and the final publication ofthe oral tradition did not take placeuntil af2'r the turn of the twentiethcentury. By that time, however,belletristic writers. had begun to taketheir inspiration from a society that hadbecome relatively more complicated.

LANDOWNERSHIP

As the diversity of Baltic literaryefforts grew the social, economic, andpolitical context in which it was setcontinued to change. The Latvian andEstonian nationalist movements, havingpassed through a generation of fiery anddedicated founders, became more sober andturned increasingly to matters of econom­ics. By the 1800s all of the majorcities of the Baltic provinces had sub­stantial communities of Latvians andEstonians, who now constituted importantelements in ~ economic life of each ofthese cities. HaVing a residential andeconomic base, Latvians and Estonianssought to consolidate their position bygaining political power as well, butsuccess in this venture was very slow incoming. Defining politics in a broadsense, it can be said that the Latviansand Estonians, by the 1800s, already

533/Plakans

possessed considerable power in ruralareas. But in cities and towns successwas minllDal. In rural areas, changinglaws had enabled Latvian and Estonianpeasants to buy land outright, so that bythe 1800s there had come into being asubstantial segment of peasant land­owners, many of them well-to-do. Yeteven by the turn of the century, half therural land in the two provinces was stillin the hands of Baltic Germans. Thusthere was insufficient rural prope23Y forall of those who wanted to own it. Therural population was expanding, and thismeant in the long run that rural areaswould be overpopulated. Alongside thestrata of relatively well-to-do Latvianand Estonian landowners, and the small­holders of these nationalities, there wasalso a growing subpopulation of landlesspeasants, who had the minllDal choice ofearning their living as hired laborers oremigrating. Landlessness remained aserious problem, and emigration was acharacteristic of the provincial popu­lations well into the twentieth century.It has been estimated that by the tum ofthe century some 10 percent of both theLatvian and Estonian speaking populationsin the Russian Empire were living outsideof the tlfundaries of the Bal ticprovinces.

AT TIlE TURN OF TIlE CENrURY

By the 1890s life in the Baltic area hadcome to resemble that of much of the restof Europe. The provinces now had all ofthe same social problems that character­ized other regions of a continentundergoing the strains of industrializa­tion. The continuing conflict between

10

nationalities, however, made for sharperdivision in the social realm. The"national awakening" period was longover, but the Latvian and Estonianpopulations were still politically power­less in comparison to the Baltic Germans.The economic wealth of these two subjectnationalities had increased, to be sure,but this had not been accompanied by anyrelaxation on the part of the BalticGermans of their hold over regionalpolitical institutions. For a time, theLatvians and Estonians thought that thissituation could be reversed if theysupported the russification efforts ofthe Imperial government, which st~5ted inearnest during the later 1880s. Thebelief was that the introduction ofadditional Imperial Bureaucrats andRussian institutions into the provinceswould weaken Baltic German control andallow the Latvians and Estonians at leasta small amount of autonomy. But theRussian government, despite grandioseplans, l!!9nSlled to implement only a fewrussification measures, mostly to thedetriment of the Latvian and Estoniannational aspirations. By the end of thecentury, nationalism among the subjectnationalities was as strong as it hadever been; and now there was the addeddimension of resentment against the crownof attempting to russify the newlyemerging national cultures. Moreover,within the nationalities, other divisionshad appeared, especially between thosewho remained willing to work for slowreform and those who had become adherentsof Marxism and looked for a revolution.The earlier unity which Latvians andEstonians had felt as they first struckout against Baltic German overlordshipwas not threatening to disappear.

NOTES

lSee Reinhardt Wittram, Baltische Geschichte (Munich, 1954) for the bestgeneral introduction to the political history of the Baltic area.

Southern Illinois University

533/P1akans

~illiam Urban, The Baltic Crusade (DeKalb:Press, 1975).

3J. Vasar, Die grosse livlilndische Giiterreduktion.universitatis Tartuensis. Vol. XXII (Tartu, 1931).

11

Acta et commentationes

4Friedrich Bienemann, Die Staathalterschaftszeit in Liv- und Estland (Leipzig,1886) •

5Edgars Dunsdorfs, Latvijas vesture 1710-1800 (Stockholm: Daugava, 1973), pp.275-314.

6Dunsdorfs, Latvijas vesture 1710-1800, Chapter 4.

7Jerome Blum, "The Rise of Serfdan in Eastern Europe," American HistoricalReview LXII (1957), pp. 826-33.

8Some of these are described in Garlieb Merkel, Die Letten (Leipzig, 1800).Merkel was one of a handful of Baltic German intellectuals who po1emicized againstserfdan, especially in its Baltic form.

9Andrejs Plakans, "Population Turnover in a Serf Estate 1797-1811," papergiven at History of the Family Conference, Brigham Young University, March 1978.

lOAndrejs Plakans, "Seigneurial Authority and Peasant Family Life: The Baltic. Area in the Eighteenth Century," Journal of Interdisciplinary History IV (1975), pp.

629-54.

11Andrejs Plakans, "Identifying Kinfolk Beyond the Household," Journal of

Family History II (1977), pp. 3-26.

12Ansley J. Coale, Barbara Anderson and Erna Hlirm, Human Fertility in RussiaSince the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), Chapter 2.

13Dunsdorfs, Latvijas vesture 1710-1800, pp. 315-85.

14Herbert Creutzburg, Die Entwicklung der kurliindischen AgrarverWtnisse seitAufhebung der Leibeigenschaft (Konigsberg, 1910).

15Arveds Svabe, Grundriss der Agrargeschichte Lettlands (Riga: B. Lamey,1928) •

16Andrejs Plakans, "The National Awakening in Latvia 1850-1900," unpublisheddissertation, Harvard University, 1969, Chapters 4 and 5.

17Andrejs Plakans, "Peasants, Intellectuals, and Nationalism in the RussianBaltic Provinces, 1820-1890," Journal of Modem History 46 (1974), pp. 445-75.

18For a description of some of the authors of this early literature seeMargarete Lindemuth, "Krisjanis Valdemsrs und Atis Kronvalds: Zwei lettischeVolkstumskampger," Baltische Hefte XUI (1967), pp. 84-107.

19p1akans , "Peasants, Intellectuals, and Nationalism," pp. 464-65.

533/Plakans 12

20For a general history of Latvian literature see Janis Andrups and VitautsK.alve, Latvian literature: Essays (Stockholm: Zelta Abele, 1954).

21The first major collection was Krisjanis Barons and Henri Wissendorffs,Latwju dainas (Moscow and St. Petersburg, 1894-1905).

22Arnolds Spekke, History of Latvia (Stockholm: Zelta Abele, 1957), pp. 316.

23A1freds Bilmanis, Baltic Essays (Washington, D.C.: Latvian Legation), p. 96.

24Retabulation of populations statistics concerning Latvians and Estonians, as

presented in the 1897 Imperial census, can be found in Margeris Skujenieks,"Iecelosana un izcelosana Latvija," Domas X (1913), p. 1156 ff.

25See Edward Thaden, ed., Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland1850-1914, in press, Princeton University Press, January, 1981.

THE PEOPLE OF THE BALTIC:SOURCES THAT TELL THE STORY OF THEIR LIVES

Andrejs Plakans

Born in Latvia. Resides in Ames, Iowa. Assistant professor of history, Iowa StateUniversity. Ph.D. (history), Harvard University. Author, lecturer.

THE GOALS OF HISTORICAL DEMOGRAPHY

In recent decades European historicaldemographerr have set for themselves twoobjectives. First, they have tried togather as much evidence as possible aboutthe basic facts of birth, death, marri­age, and migration, so as to be able tostudy long-term patterns and variationsin patterns in the different Europeancountries. Second, they have also triedto cane to grips with the problem ofsocial structure, conceiving structure asinvolving the study of families, house­holds, and kin groups, as well as large,inelusive social classes. It cannot besaid about any of these areas of researchthat the quest for basic information isnow over. While we have a good ideaabout what was going on in the westernparts of Europe, much of the rest of thecontinent remains unexplored in thissense. The por,trait of the historicpopulations of Europe is being painted bymeans of very small brush strokes, and itwill be some time before the entireportrait will be finished. At the sametime, however, it has to be said that wenow have a far better idea of whatperspective and colors to use in such aportrait than did historians three orfour decades ago.

The work has proceeded slowly because ithas sought to build generalizations onthe basis of population enumerations andsurveys that have the form of lists ofindiViduals, rather than on the basis ofaggregated statistics. Because theorigins, intentions, and procedures ofsuch surveys are not always known.historians have had to proceed very

carefully in order to gain the bestpossible understanding of What the datain the sources really mean. It has beennecessary to decide what camnunities arerepresenta~ive of regional populations,how missing data can be inferred from theevidence that is available, how to linkindividuals into larger units such asfamilies and households, and how toobtain evidence about population changesover a period of time when ortlysingle­year enumerations are available. Thetime involved in such work has beenreduced considerably by the availabilityof the cooputer to process the data thatcan be fed into it. but even the computerhas not eliminated the hU:'ldreds ofdecisions and interpretations that haveto be made in the data preparation stage.

THE SITUATION IN EASTERN EUROPE

Research concerning basic populationpatterns in eastern European history hasnot proceeded as quickly as such work forthe western are'2s, for several inter­related reasons. Generally speaking,eastern European scholars developedinterests in demographic research onlyrecently; and even now, far less researchtime in eastern European academies,institutes, and universities is devotedto demographic topics than in comparableinstitutions in the West. There is alsothe fact that in researching historicalquantitative sources, eastern Europeanscholars are far more likely to concen­trate on economic matters, in the beliefthat changes in the ecoUOOlic substructureof past societies has produced demo­graphic changes. In this conception,

522/Plakans

demographic evidence is of secondaryimportance; and population studies thatare not linked to econanic changes areconsidered to have been inadequatelyresearched. Since western scholars arenot always guided by such a philosophy,they have been more free to concentrateon population questions as such in theexpectation that in due course demo­graphic and economic research will beintegrated when the basic facts in eachdomain have been established. In anycase, the work that has been done bywestern scholars on eastern Europeansources suggests very strongly that thepotential of such sources for yieldingextensive and accurate evidence is verygreat. What we know now about populationchanges in eastern Europe falls largelyinto the period from 1800 to the present.Evidence fran the pre-nineteenth-centuryera is still sparse, and most of thebasic work still needs to be done. Evenso, because of the advances in the west,it is possible to use the westernexperience as a guide to evaluate easternEuropean sources. The availability ofwestern evidence also allows substantivefindings about the east to be stated in acomparative fashion.

TIlE MAJOR EASTERN EUROPEAN SOURCES

One of the problems facing easternEuropean population research in thepremodern period is the unstablepolitical history of the region. Theauthorities that collected populationinformation changed frequently, and theareas their surveys covered were notlikely to have the same boundaries forlong periods of time. Even in arelatively limited geographical area,population sources can exist in severaldifferent languages and employ verydifferent techniques of enumeration. Inthe Baltic provinces of the RussianEmpire, for example, the best sources forthe seventeenth century--cadasters--arein German or Swedish; the most detailedsources for the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies--the soul revisions--werecarried out in German; and the firstmodern census of the Russian Elnpire, in

2

1897, was taken in the Russian language.Because of the territorial changes, theresearcher can never be sure t inaddition, that even the locality thatshows up in all three sources includedexactly the same area. Conversely, alocal camnunity may appear in one censusand disappear in another because thecensus takers defined the regiondifferently in each document. Thediscontinuities in language andgeography, therefore, make long-termstudies very difficult, especially onsubjects that require consistent data.There also exist, in these sources, thenormal problems of all premodernpopulation documents: undercounting;imprecise ages; limited number of firstnames and,' surnames; and weak linkinginformation, so that, for instance, tw

brothers living in different householdscannot be identified as brothers. Thelist of such problems could be easilyextended, and few of them are peculiar tothe east. In any case, there are fourmajor types of sources which areavailable for eastern Europe, and I willdiscuss their characteristics byreference to the concrete examples thatare available from the history of theRussian Baltic provinces.

Cadasters

The land census, or cadaster, was usuallyinitiated by a regional or nationalgovernment that wanted to levy a new taxand needed information on how much landwas available to be taxed. Within thatgeneral concern, a cadaster could be madeto serve other purposes, depending uponwhat additional, more specializedinformation the authorities wanted at thetime. They might be interested in howmuch livestock individuals possessed;what types of crops were being grown; howmuch land was in arable, in pasture, inwaste, or how much was flooded; and,finally, who the people were whoinhabited the land. I have placed peopleas the final concern, for, indeed, incadasters the counting of humanpopulations was deemed far less importantthan the measurement of material goods.This means that even though human

S22/Plakans

populations are dealt with in almost allcadasters that I have seen, we cannotexpect too much precise information aboutthem. In the Baltic province of Uvland,for example, the Swedish authoritiescarried out cadastral surveys from 1601to 1638, and again in 1688, in the courseof which the Latvian-language peasantryof the area was caught up for the firsttime in histo'! in a systematic countingof any sort. But in the cadastralrecord itself, as shown in figure 1, wefind the information about human beingsto be relatively imprecise. The surveyexpedition was interested in able-bodiedmales primarily; and in their ages onlyinsofar as the male population needed tobe divided between those below and overfifteen years. Moreover, the records ofthe expeditions indicate that systematicinquiry was not carried out in all of theinhabited parts of the province; and thatthe surveyors took information variouslyfrom peasants themselves, from estateauthorities, and sanetimes fran peasantsreporting about the conditions in thefarmsteads of other peasants. Whilecertain estimates can be made on thisevidence about the total population ofthe province, these estimates have toremain guesswork.

Nonetheless, even relatively weak surveyssuch as the cadasters can be of sane usefor investigating human populations.Trough we cannot expect to derive fromthem accurate statistics about birth,death, marriage, and migration, theenumeration in them of coresident malesallows for inferences about family struc­ture. Figure 1, which containstranscribed entries from the 1638cadaster, shows how this is true. Wefirst make note of all of the malesmentioned in the entry and develop anideograph on the basis of the relation­ships stated as existing among them.This yields what might be called the coreof the male population, and the entireseries ~ideographs for a particularlocality or region will reflect, howeverroughly, the distribution of structuresbased on kin links among males. Thespecific methodology by means of whichthe analyst can proceed from such ideo-

3

graph series to generalizations aboutaspects of family life has been workedout by the anthropologist Eugene A.Hannnel, who faced similar problems indealing

4with medieval documents from

Serbia. An analysis based on thestructure of coresident groups of malesallows us to form a rough estimate aboutth~ relative frequency of simple andcanp1ex family groups, when canplexity isdefined as growing out of male links •Thus we should be able to tell approxi­mately how frequently married sons werestill in residence with their fathers,how many farmsteads had married brothersliving in them, and how many were headedby simple families. It is understood inrecords of, this kind that certain kindsof complexity will remain entirelyundetected: widowed elderly mothersliving with married sons, unmarriedsisters living with married brothers whohad becane heads, and so forth. In theabsence of anything better, however, evena record of males constitutes a step awayfran ignorance.

If the cadaster contains enough informa­tion on human populations to make anexpanded inquiry worthwhile, the obviousnext step is to link demographic data (inthis case data about family structure)with the econanic information availablein the document. As other cadasters, the1638 Livland survey contained a notationabout the size of the peasant I s land ,which normally was an areal measureindirectly. That is, in Livland, peasantland was measured in Haken (Latin: uncus;Latvian: arkls), which meant the amountof land that could Sbe worked with onehorse and one plow. How much actualacreage a Haken represented apparentlyvaried from place to place and fromregion to region. Nonetheless,premodern surveys often took the Haken(or sane similar unit) as a basic measurenot only for the holding size ofpeasants, but also as the unit on thebasis of which the peasant's obligationto the landowner was determined. In thepremodern centuries in the Baltic, a"typical" peasant holding was said tohave consisted of 1/4 Haken, as is thecase with many of our examples in figure

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1. In addition, the cadaster also statedthe amO\lllt of different kinds of grainthe peasant had sowed and the nlJIDber 0 fdifferent types of livestock hepossessed. On occasion, in the cadaster,it was also noted what dues in labor,money, or kind the peasant owed to theestate owner, but there were other estatedocuments that described this matter moreprecisely.

Experience with single-year surveys ofany kind in other European countries hasrevealed the limits of the generaliza­tions that can be based on them. Even ifmales-only ideographs are obtained, westill know that each ideograph does notexhibit the "structure" which that familyhad f0l; the entirety of its develoI'J!entalcycle. The absence of ages for farm­stead heads in the 1638 cadaster preventsthe simulation of develoI'J!ental cycle,and consequently statements as to whatthe "typical" regional familial patternsmight have been have to be made withgreat care. Moreover, the mention ofvery few proper names in the cadastermakes it impossible for genealogicalsearches to be carried out with anydegree of accuracy; for that purposeother doclJIDents might be of greaterassistance.

Manorial Rolls

The expansion of the importance of thelanded estate as a basic unit in therural economy of eastern Europe meantthat the nature of the peasant laborforce on each estate was of grave concernto the estate owner. Peasants, who weremore often than not enserfed, were theonly source of agricultural labor, andthe farmsteads or village households inwhich they lived served as the basis ofcalculating the dues (in labor, money,and kind) that were owed to thelandowner. Oftentimes these dues were amatter of customary, unwrittenunderstanding; but as estate ownersturned more to distant markets for theagricultural yield of their estates,record keeping became a more seriousbusiness. A clear record of what wasowed by each peasant holding became

4

increasingly necessary, and one resultwas the creation of account books which,in English, have come to be referred togenerically as "manorial rolls." In theBaltic provinces these doclJIDents werecalled Wackenbncher, and they figureprominently in the land records ofestates until the early nineteent9century, when serfdom was abolished.The format and content of these sourcesvaried greatly from estate to estate, andsome estates had none at alL Oneobstacle to asslJIDing that they reflectedreality at a given point in time is thatthey could not be drawn up every year;and it is frequently impossible, evenfrom internal evidence, to know preciselywhen they .were created. Sane Wacken­bucher were u~jated continuously, andsane were not; furthermore, in all theWackenbUcher that have survived, it istrue that detailed information on humanpopulation was again not the principalconcern. Consequently, the utility of aparticular WacY~nbuch for populationhistory depends very much on the detailwhich was originally introduced in it bythe agents of the landowner when it wasfirst drawn up.

As can be seen frOlll figures 2a and 2b,Wackenbucher formats could vary a greatdeal, sometimes having entirely hand­written formats and sometimes printedones. The reason for their existence wasto prOVide a record of dues, and thusmost of the information in them revolvesaround thst central concern. Someestates noted dues only (2b), whileothers used additional columns in whichit was noted whether a particular holdinghad on it a full peasant family, whetherthat family had able-bodied males in it,whether there were present farmhands whocould do work, and so forth (2a). Theexpectation that Wackenbiicher will yieldprecise population statistics is againunwarranted, but the best of them doallow for the creation of family struc­ture ideographs based on links betweenmales, and for the use of the Hammelanalysis mentioned in connection with thecadasters. As far as aggregated popula­tion figures are concerned, Wackenbiicherare even poorer sources than the

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cadasters. Cadasters were normallyproduced by expeditions of enumeratorswhere assigrnnent was to cover an entireregion, while the Wackenbucher wereconcerned with the conditions onparticular estates and owed theirexistence to the willingness ofparticular landowners to cover the costs(in man-hours) of drawing them up.

A very good Wackenbuch, however, in whichat least the male members and the approx­imate size of the peasant family can beidentified, will yield extremely impor­tant information about a dimension ofpeasant existence which is not recordedanywhere else. In a cadaster, we canobtain data about the actual "wealth" ofa peasant family: the amounts of seedthat were sown, the numbers of differentkinds of livestock and working animalsthat were present, and the relative"size" (in Eaken) of the holding. In theWackenbuch,--onthe other hand, we have arecord of how much of a peasant family'slabor time, crop yield, and new animalshad to be surrendered annually to theestate owner. If these records arelinked, the possibility exists for cal­culating, however roughly, the materialconditions of life of peasant families inrelation to their size and membership.Such calculations will always be hased onevidence which is less neat then we wouldlike it to be; for instance, the linkedrecords may not be from the same year.On the other hand, in the Baltic area,peasants' holdings and the physicalstructures on them had unique names,which did not chauge as their inhabitantscame and went, thus creating some con­tinuity in the data. The expectationthat we will obtain a perfect record forindividual peasant families in thepremodern period is not likely ever to befulfilled, but, as I suggested in connec­tion with the cadasters, even poor infor­mation constitutes a step away fromignorance concerning populations whichdid not keep, and could not have kept,records of their own.

From the historian's viewpoint, theWackenbiicher differ from cadasters alsoin the time dimension that is implied in

5

the social statistics they provide. Thepicture yielded by a cadaster is a staticpicture; it is description of conditionsat a point in time. In the cadaster wedo not find any evidence that would allowus to infer the patterns of the chrono­logical or agricultural year. But inWackenbiicher (e.g., figure 2b) there is atime dimension implied in the statisticson labor service. Thus in figure 2b, wenote that the family of the peasantSkreies Jahnis had to send for work onthe manor farm one man with a horse for1-1/2 days a week during the entire year,one man without a horse 1-1/2 days a weekfrom 23 April (St. George's Day) to 29September (St. Michael's Day); and oneman for 3/," of a day each week from 29September 'to 23 April, that is, duringthe winter months. In addition to thesenormal obligations (Ordinair-Gehorch) ,additional obligations (Hulf!H?"horch)entailed thirty-two days oTamBtr-horseteam, and forty-eight days of a manalone, during the StDIDDer months; and alesser amount of additional labor duringthe winter period. Assuming that eachpeasant family met its obligationsregularly, it is possible (in theory) tocalculate labor movement within theestate for the major periods of the cycleof the agricultural year: that is, toidentify the most important framework ofthe minutiae of peasant existence. Nosuch possibility is offered by acadaster, nor by the other records weshall mention. Thus, in spite of theimprecise population figures, themanorial rolls can be used to add animportant element to the portrait of theeveryday life of the peasantry.

Parish Registers

In the Baltic, as elsewhere in easternEurope, the parish clergy tried to keepcontinuous records of births, deaths, andmarriages in their congregations, as wellas information on who stood as godparentsfor baptized children, how much eachworshiping family tithed, the expenses ofthe church, who was undergoing trainingfor confirmation, who attended regularly,and who did not. These continuousrecords have come to be known generically

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as "parish registers" in English; in th!lBaltic they were termed Kirchenbucher.Certain kinds of evidence from them--suchas the records of births, deaths, andmarriages--have been used widely inhistorical demographic analysis forderiving a wide variety of rates andmeasures: fertility and mortality rates,ages at first marriage, marriage rates,age differences between husbands andwives, ages of wives at first childbirth,the spacing of children, illegitimacyrates, and longevity rates. Thesemeasures have been extracted from parishregisters by means of the method offamily reconstitution, which wasintroduced into historical demographi§research by French and English scholars.Because of the way these records werekept, with entries about individualmembers of a particular family being madeover a long stretch of historical time,the entire demographic record of a family

. has to be reassembled by the analyst; itdoes not appear in anyone place in theregister. Moreover, there are certainkinds of crucial information which parishregisters do not yield; for example,information on coresidence, or on thenetworks of kinship existing within acommunity at a particular point in time.Not all of the existing registerinformation has been used systematically;for example, the analysis of godparent­hood in the European setting remains tobe accomplished. Nonetheless, theapplication of the family reconstitutionprocedure to parish registers has yieldedan imnense amount of precise demographicinformation about the "common" people ofEurope, which has made it possible fortheir experiences to become a part of thetotal historical record.

The best parish registers in England andFrance reach back into the sixteenthcentury, while in the Baltic, registersdo not become u~ilble until the middle ofthe eighteenth. Apparently, preciserecord keeping at the parish level wasnot required of clergymen before thattime; and, in the localities where parishregisters were kept for earlier periods,documentary loss has been considerablethrough fires and other accidents.

6

Parish registers ceased to be kept in thetraditional style in 1832, when a newkind of registration was introduced; andtherefore, in the Baltic, family recon­stitution for the peasantry can seldom becarried out for a period longer than acentury, that is, perhaps three genera­tions. This contrasts sharply withpossibilities in the west, where the bestregisters (e.g., Colyton) have yieldedcontinuous informati~~ for as long asthree hundred years. In the singleinstance of attempted reconstitution (inthe Estonian-speaking area of the prov­inces) continuous records started in thelast l~ecades of the seventeenth cen­tury.

One major obstacle to successrul long­term family reconstitution· projects inserf areas of eastern Europe, includingthe Baltic, is the highly irregularnaming practices in the premodern period.The reconstitution method is based on thelinking of names of individuals so thatthe analyst can gather onto a single formscattered entries about individualsbelonging to the same family. But in theBaltic and other serf areas, the use ofsurnames to identify individuals was nota Widespread practice. A registerdesignation which appears to contain asurname may just as likely be theindividual's Christian name together withthe name of the farmstead on which that.individual was residing. In the Baltic,the names of farmsteads did not changewith changes of their residents;therefore, there is no guarantee that anindividual can be unequivocally linked toany other individual if the linking isattempted on a name basis only. Anindividual A liVing on farmstead X wouldhave his name listed as A-X in one year,but if he changed residences and startedto live on farmstead Z in the followingyear, his name would change to A-Z.Ancillary sources, though helpful, arethemselves subject to the samelimitations •

Though the success of family reconsti­tution in the Baltic remains in doubtuntil more registers are experimentedwith, the registers can be a source of

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other kims of information valuable forunderstanding the family lives ofenserfed peasants. On occasion,clergymen drew up household lists andentered these in the church record~3

apparently for their own reference.Lists of this kind, of course, can beanalyzed for structural information. Inscme parishes, energetic clergymen keptrelatively thorough records on the pre­paration of young people for confirma­tion, which involved an assessment oftheir level of literacy. Along this sameline, at least One clergyman in theprovince of Kurland kept literacystatistics for his parish for the entireperiod of his service, producing tabularentries in the register about the IlIJIllberof persons in each peasant household whocould read, who coul'\tr'ite, and who hadboth of these skills. Sane clergy keptcontinuous aggregated records on churchattendance, as well as aggregated annualrecords on the IlIJIllber of births, deaths,and marriages among their parishioners.Finally, an underutilized type ofevidence pertains to the practice ofgodparenthood or sponsorship, which canbe interP13ted as an aspect of socialstructure. Through sponsors, peasantparents tried to enlarge the number ofadults who would have responsibility forthe baptized child if the parentsthemselves happened to die, and this verysignificant practice can suggest thedegree of importance attached to dif­ferent kims of kinfolk (if kin werechosen as sponsors) or to unrelatedpeople who must have been linked withbonds of friendship to the parentalcouple. All of these different kinds ofevidence cannot be expected to appear inany regular fashion, since with a changeof the parish clergymen the condition ofthe registers could change dramatically.A series of responsible clergymen,however, could produce a continuousrecord of evidence about the structuresof everyday life to which the analystcould not obtain an entry in any otherway. The main imnediate obstacle is thelocation of the Baltic parish records,the bulk of which are in Riga or Tallinnin the USSR and therefore not accessiblefor extended analysis.

7

Soul Revisions

Starting with the early eighteenthcentury and ending in 1859, the Imperialgovernment of Russia carried out tenmajor tax censuses, which were supposedto create a basis for calculating theamount of hf~d tax owed by localities toth", Crown. Similar capitation taxcensuses were carried out elsewhere ineastern Europe, but because the Russiancensus-the soul revision-is prohablythe best known I will discuss thepotential of these sources in terms ofthe Russian example, particularly 'dothreference to the revisions in the Balticarea. The Baltic provinces appearedrelatively" late in the series: Livlandand Estland in the fourth revision, andKurland in the fifth in 1797. The earlyrevisions apparently enumerated onlymales, but depending on the region,coverage in time became better. TheKurland revision in 1797, for example,enumerated all persons regardless of sexor age; the next one, in 1811, fell hackto the males-only procedure; but the nextone after 1811, in 1831'7 again used themore thorough approach. There do notexist at this time complete inventoriesdescribing the contents of particularrevisions in localities for any region ofthe empire, and the quantitative analysesof them carried out by Russian scholarshave normally referred only to aggregatedfigures. Thus we do not yet know whethermicroanalysis of families, households,and kin groups is possible for a wideselection of localities or whether suchpossibilities exist for only a smallnumber of sites.

In the final analysis the thoroughness ofthese enumerations depended very much onthe trouble the local authorities wantedto go to. Apparently, only summarystatistics were sent to St. Petersburg,and thus scme local enumerators did nomore than count individuals in order toget sunmary figures. Other officials,however, used the opportunity to obtaindetailed information about the localitiesunder their jurisdiction, and thereforeleft the historian with exceptionallyfine records to analyze. In the Baltic

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area, this was true of both thecountryside and the city (see figures 3aand 3b), and the resulting documentsprovide evidence for answering a longseries of historical demographicquestions.

The format of the revisions was rela­tively simple. The enumerator wasrequired to list all males of a parti­cular inhabited locality, most often aserf estate, and to subdivide that listinto groups of people who were notsubject to the head tax, those who were,and special groupings such as Jews.

. These subdivisions varied from provinceto province, but the ultimate concern wasa figure on the basis of which thenecessary tax calculations could be made.Beyond these requirements, the enumeratorwas free to include as much (or aslittle) detail as he wished. It appearsthat in the Baltic area each revision,became the basis for the next one, sothat the revision after 1797 in Kurlandand after 1782 in Livland usuallycontained three columns, as in figure3a. The first of these listedindividuals as they appeared in the lastrevision, the second a notation to whathad happened to those persons since thelast revision (whether they had died, ormoved to another camnunity, or were nowliVing in another household in the samecOlllllunity), and the final column, if thatperson was still present, noted his orher name and age as of the year of therevision being carried out. Therevisions were supposed to be made inintervals of fifteen years; in practice,this usually meant sixteen or seventeenyears. In the Baltic, as a consequenceof the early emancipation of serfs in the1817-1820 period, there were additionalrevisions just before and during theemancipation so that in these provincesthe sequence of available documents issomewhat different than elsewhere.

These records constitute, in essence, aseries of household censuses, since inmost areas the enumerators produced notonly lists of undifferentiated names, butsubdivided the lists, within each largercategory, into the residential units in

8

which people actually lived. This meansthat each revision can be subjected tothe kind of household list analysis thathas been pioneeri~ by Peter Las1ett andhis colleagues. Moreover, since asequence of revisions exists, it is alsopossible to do population turnoverstudies, to obtain statistical measure­ments of the changes 1'9 local populationfor a series of years. Either of thesetwo exercises can be carried out withoutreference to the names of particularindividuals, if one chooses to focus onsuch matters as age structure andhousehold structure and the movement ofpersons in or out of the estate, as in aturnover study. As far as the study ofthe life cycle of particular individualsis concerned, the possibilities aresomewhat weaker , since the intervalbetween revisions does not allow for aneasy tracing of people from one revisionto the next. Moreover, there is theproblem of names, already mentioned inconnection with the sources discussedearlier.

Most of the revisions list persons in thecontext of their residential groups, andvery frequently they give the connectiona person had to the head of that group.Consequently, these sources permit theanalysis of the structure of a family asit existed at the lIlCIIlent of the revision.A few revision documents go beyond this,however, and thus enhance the possibilityof idenz&fying the composition of kingroups. In a few revisions theenumerator added to the name of eachlisted individual the name of thathdividual 's father, or sane other seniorrelative, and indicated where thatrelative was living if the two were notcoresidents. This added dimension of thedata allows the analyst to produce, witha high degree of accuracy, a -morecanplete genealogical record for each ofthe persons on the list, unless thatperson is a recent in-migrant.

If such additional information is notavailable, it is possible to attempt thelinking of a revision and the parishregister of a particular locality. Inthis manner the analyst can track down

522/Plakans

the connections between people living inseparate households, and can determinewhether persons who are living alone,that is, without any relatives in thehousehold, are indeed alone when examinedin the context of the whole canmunity.Without such a corrective one mightmisinterpret the data by assuming thatthe incidence of, for example, 2fphanhoodwas far larger than in reality. In theBaltic it was a characteristic offarmhand families that they put rela­tively young children out to work inother farmsteads.

In the Baltic area, a sharp break in thenature of personal identification camewith the emancipation of serfs. With theacquisition of personal freedom, and withthe possibility of migration within theprovince as well as beyond it, peasantswere judged to be in need of surnames sothat records about them could be keptmore easily. The surnames enter theparish registers and the revisiondocuments during t~ 1820s and in therevision of 1833. The reason forcharacterizing this as a sharp break isthat the surname a peasant familyacquired was not necessarily derived fromthe name of the farmstead in which theywere living or by reference to the namethey may have had before the emancipa­tion. The procedures for grantingsurnames to peasants differed fran placeto place. In some cases peasants wereasked by enumerators the surname theywished to adopt, and it turned out thatsane peasant families had already beenusing surnames even though these did notappear in official documents. In sanecases, there was no match between newsurnames and old ones, or between the newones and the place-names in the localityin which the peasants lived. In some

9

cases, peasants were assigned surnamesrather arbitrarily; for example, theymight be assigned a Latvianized form ofthe German name of the estate owner onwhose land the peasant lived. Sometimes,these surnames were created entirely adhoc, being based on the peasant'sphysical appearance or sane other factor.The consequence of this procedure wasthat the records after the emancipationcannot be matched very easily with· thoseof the pre-emancipation period, if therecord linking is conducted on a namebasis only. Genealogical searchesfrequently have to stop with theemancipation, because there is no way ofmatching names before and after thisperiod. !'

In terms of the development of documen­tary sources for the study of Balticpopulations, the "premodern" period endswith the soul revision of 1859. The nextenumeration, in 1881, was a moderncensus. In it, what the analyst loses interms of data for the study of family andhousehold structure, he gains in terms ofevidence for exploring the variation indemographic patterns over the entireBaltic area. The original forms of the1881 census may no longer exist, andtherefore the 1859 revision is probablythe last of the Baltic surveys in whichstructural evidence is obtainable.Similar shifts in the nature of popula­tion sources occurred in most of theeastern European countries in the secondhalf of the nineteenth century, or in thedecades imnediately preceding World War1. The published results of moderncensuses require very different proce­dures of analysis and therefore adiscussion of th~3may be safely left foranother occasion.

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NOTES

15

1A good survey of current developments in historical demography, especially as

they pertain to the history of the family, is the special "Family" issue of Daedalus(Spring, 1977); see, in particular, the essay by E. A. Wrigley, pp. 71-86.

2Leszek A. Kosinski, "Sources of Demographic Statistics in East CentralEurope," in L. A. Kosinski, ed., Demographic Developments in Eastern Europe (New York,1977), pp. 64-75; and other essays in this volume.

3Edgars Dunsdorfs, Vidzemes arklu revizijas, 1601-1638 (Riga: University ofLatvia, 1938); and by the same author, Der grosse schwedische Kataster in Livland,l681~1710 (Stockholm: Wahlstron and Widstrand, 1950).

4E• A. Hamnel, "The Zadruga as Process," in Peter Laslett and Richard Wall,OOs., Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, Engl.: Cambridge University Press,1972), pp. 335-73.

5E. Dunsdorfs, "Zum Hakenproblem," Commentationes Baltical I (1953), pp. 1-26.

6The use of the developnental cycle concept in analysis of European historical

materials is discussed in Lutz K. Berkner, "The Stem Family and the DevelopnentalCycle of the Peasant Household: An Eighteenth-century Austrian Example," AmericanHistorical Review LXXXVII (1972), pp. 398-418.

7A detailed analysis of this type of source can be found in Edgars Dunsdorfs,

Uksensernas Vidzemes muizu saimniecibas gramatas, 1624-1654 (Riga, 1935).

8A discussion of record keeping in the Baltic Lutheran Church is to be foundin B. Gruner-Salgaln, "Kirchenarchiv und Kirchenchronik," Baltische Monatschrift evIU(1904), pp. 231-47.

9See E. A. Wrigley, "Family Reconstitution," in E. A. Wrigley, ed., AnIntroduction to English Historical Demography (New York: Basic Books, 1966), pp.96-159; and M. Fleury and L. Henry, Des registers paroissiaux a l'histoire de lapopulation (Paris: INED, 1956).

lOHermann von Bruiningk, "Die alteren Kirchenbucher .LivIands," Sitzungsbe­richte der Gesellschaft fur Geschichte und Altertumskunde der OstseeprovinzenRusslands (1898), pp. 46-67.

llE. A. Wrigley, "Mortality in Pre-industrial England: The Example of Colyton,Devon, aver Three Centuries," Daedalus 97 (1968), pp. 546-80.

12Heldur Palli, "Parish Registers, Revisions of Land and Souls, FamilyReconstitution and Household in 17th and 18th Century Estonia," in Sune Akerman, ed.,Chance and Change (Odense, 1978), pp. 143-46.

13Examples of the different kinds of information that can be obtained in theBaltic parish registers can be found in the transcribed, edited, and printed excerptsof Livland registers in Lauma Sloka, ed., Vidzemes draudzu kronikas (Riga: Valstsarchivs, 1925-27).

522/Plakans 16

14Latmla Sloka, ed., Kurzemes draudzu kronikas (Riga: Valsts archivs, 1930),vol. 9, part 2, pp. 19, 25, 220, 246.

15See E. A. Hammel, Alternative Social Structures and Ritual Relations in theBalkans (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1968).

16v. M. Kabuzan, Izmeneniia v razmeshchenii naseleniia Rossii v XVIII - pervoipolovine XIXX v., po materialam revizii (Moscow, 1971).

17A discussion of the revisions in the Baltic area can be found in Andrejs

Plakans, "Peasant Farmsteads and Households in the Baltic Littoral, 1797," ComparativeStudies in Society and History XVII (1975), pp. 2-35.

18peter Laslett, "The Study of Society Structure from Listings of Inhabi­tants," in E. A. Wrigley, ed. An Introduction to English Historical Demography (NewYork: Basic Books, 1966), pp. 160-208.

19See the chapter on population turnover, "Clayworth and Cogenhoe," in PeterLaslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations (Cambridge, Eng!.:Cambridge University Press, 1977).

20Andrejs Plaksns, "Identifying Kinfolk Beyond the Household," Journal of

Family History II (1977), pp. 3-27.

21Andrej s Plakans, "Parentless Children in the Soul Revisions," in DavidRansel, ed., The Family in Imperial Russia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1978), pp. 77-102.

22See Arveds Svabe, Latvijas vesture, 1800-1914 (Uppsala, 1958), pp. 114-62.

23The kinds of systematic evaluation of nineteenth-century censuses that makethem useful for the study of social structure and population are discussed in E. A.Wrigley, ed., Nineteenth Century Society (Cambridge, Engl.: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1972). Similar evaluations need to be carried out on all of the easternEuropean censuses, but very few attempts have been made in that direction.

Other Resources Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania

Baltic States Cindy’s List Links http://www.cyndislist.com/baltic.htm

Eastern Europe Resources http://www.lib.umich.edu/area/Slavic/resdirhome.html

Estonian Historical Archives http://www.eha.ee/english/english.htm

State Archives of Latvia http://www.arhivi.lv/index.php?&3

Lithuanian State Archives http://www.archyvai.lt/archyvai/selectLanguage.do?language=en

Lithuanian Global Genealogical Society http://www.lithuaniangenealogy.org/ FamilySearch Wikihttps://wiki.familysearch.org/en/Main_Page