Imperial Russian Records
Complete Lyakhovichi Records Catalog (Google Docs Spreadsheet)
Imperial Russian Records of Lyakhovichi Residents and Emigres by Deborah G. Glassman, copyright.
This page had originally been created to highlight the Imperial Russian documents of the Twentieth Century, which was always an entirely artificial construct. There was no effective difference between records created in the Russian Empire in the 1880s and the 1910s. But it was handy to be able to look at the different types of records created in Lyakhovichi in the Twentieth Century, by the national jurisdiction that engendered them. The concept remains valuable, but the information can easily be expanded to cover all periods from the Czarist period of Russian history.
This page examines the data that can be extracted from the Russian Tax Lists of 1883 and 1884, the Russian Revision Lists, and we hope to help it grow.
The Persecution of the Jews in Russia, printed 1891 is a pdf containing an English language, public domain work with all of the Jewish Laws of the Russian Empire, a resource that you will want to bookmark. The actual laws still in effect down to the year 1890, begin on page 51.
Unlike the Nineteenth Century which produced at least eight Revision Lists (comparable to Censuses) which detailed every householder in Lyakhovichi along with their dependents living at home, there seem to have been no major enumerations in the Twentieth Century. The 1897 All-Russia census had been a massive undertaking, and perhaps the 23 years between it and its predecessor 1874 Revision List, seemed a good time period to repeat. In any case, even in this nation of bureaucrats, no one was anxious to begin the next one, any too soon. Still, we have a single page from a Lyakhovichi document dated 1914 that certainly seems to follow the Revision List format, see the image below shared by Gloria Kay.
Family Roll of 1914
What records were created here in the Twentieth Century?
We have in-hand, property records registered in Lyakhovichi (1900 and 1912); lists of men eligible to vote in national elections from 1905-1907; business directories of 1903 and 1911; trade directories of 1911; and some materials from the judicial courts and some notices from the Minsk Vedomosti. We also have published materials including Business Directories and memoirs that cover this period. Lyakhovichi Jews in Business Directories (which includes Russian Directories of 1903 and 1911 for Lyakhovichi, Baranovichi, Gorodishche, and Novy Mush). The later page on the Business and Residential guides between the World Wars may include info on businesses started in the earlier, Russian period. You can see, for instance, a single Jewish family with a leather trade supplying all of the cobblers and bootmakers of the area, which was in existence in 1903 and still being reported in the five years of 1926-1930.
Russian Consul Records in the United States AND Russian Consul Records in Canada. We have made extractions from these records and will be posting them in the near future. So far we have around forty Lyakhovichi area people in both of these sets of records. These are documents created by people who exited Russia on valid passports, retained their Russian "citizenship" sometimes to make property and estate transfer easier, and applied to a Russian Consul for assistance. The types of actions for which they received assistance included probate, declarations of military service completed, and more. We have seen everything from notarization requests for degrees issued by Russian Universities, to witness verification of apprenticeships to the action that the Russian consul took when he had reason to believe that a Russian subject died with an American estate or claims against a US creditor. The records were created in New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and other US locations, as well as in Montreal and an Ontario city.
These following listings are for records the webmaster found at the National Archives and Record Center in Philadelphia. They are from the files of the Russian Consul in Philadelphia for affidavits regarding Draft Exemptions in 1918. The people who are named in the title of the document were those swearing out affidavits for another member of the community.
- Efraimsky - Russian Consul in Philadelphia: David Efraimsky for Benny Cable
- Slotnick - Russian Consul in Philadelphia: Schloime Slotnick for Benny Cable
- Cable - Russian Consul in Philadelphia: Benny Cable affidavit
- Cable - Russian Consul in Philadelphia: Benny Cable photo page
- Zlotnick - Russian Consul in Philadelphia: Schloime Zlotnick for Harry Brody
- Efraimsky- Russian Consul in Philadelphia: David Efraimsky for Harry Brody
- Harry Brody - Russian Consul in Philadelphia: Harry Brody affidavit
- Harry Brody - Russian Consul in Philadelphia: Harry Brody photo page
- Meyer Brody - Russian Consul in Philadelphia: Meyer Brody, Russian language affidavit
Aron Palevski Nathanson of Lyakhovichi and Sydney Nova Scotia (high-resolution version)
This is part of the eight page file on this applicant but the image has been modified by the webmaster to include his photo id on the same page as one with other information about this applicant for services from the Russian Consul of Montreal. The image of Bytenski from Nova Mush below, had been the example first shown in November 2007. Lyakhovichi samples found at that time had not included a photo, so this Jewish resident originally from nearby Novy Mush had been selected by the webmaster to represent the group. We will eventually post a sample from each of the others we have extracted, all in this same reduced-size format. You should examine the original records available online from the Canadian National Archives as most files extend over a half dozen or more pages. There are a number of plusses in this search: most documents are created on forms, which are easier to interpret; one often finds English language summaries; and notarized documents are the norm.
Bytenski from Novy Mush (high-resolution version)
Records at the National level, which we know are extant in Archives, (not yet accessed for this research):
- Russian Military Records
- Registry of Internal passports
- Registry of External passports
- Court Records
- Probate Records
Russian Vital Records - Have you found birth, marriage, and death, records from Lyakhovichi in the period of the Russian Empire? We know that they were created. We have examples from other communities of their look and content. But we have not found the books or certificates created from Lyakhovichi books, so far. If you have been more fortunate in your searching, please contact the Webmaster! There are some materials that we have created which can in some measure substitute for the missing records.
"Russian Records" created in Other Jurisdictions - We have done no searches or examinations yet, but did you know that there were almost half a million POWs (437,000) sent home after World War I, and that one of the supervisory agencies (the Nansen Relief organization which was responsible for coordinating the Red Cross and other agencies) estimated, that half were of Russian nationality? Did you know that they claimed that there were two million "Russian Refugees" in other parts of Europe after WWI? In addition to the records created in these other jurisdictions, it is likely some communication was made with Russian officials about each of these people, and the fonds with that correspondence might be different than those traditionally associated with emigres and military captives.
Russian Business Records - This subject is largely uninvestigated. This portion of a 1907 page in The Catholic Encyclopedia published by the Knights of Columbus Truth Committee, would not be a source I would normally find, but online searching for information on insurance in Russia turned this up. Do you know anything about insurance in Lyakhovichi? We had some devastating fires that would be worth spending some time investigating if we knew who was likely to be a carrier in our region of Minsk gubernia in this period.
Russian Insurance
Russian judicial court records - These records are well within the sphere of others we have seen in the Historical Archives but they are of greatly divergent types. I would love to have a knowledgeable person write on the courts that affected Lyakhovichi. The summons below is from a court elsewhere in the Russian empire and the volost court picture below that is not the volost that met on Lyakhovichi's Sanitorium Street. Can you direct us to images more closely related to Lyakhovichi? Both of the images below were included in a valuable book titled Russian Peasants go to Court - Legal Culture in the Countryside 1905-1917, by Jane Burbank, published by Indiana U Press, 2004. Many of her comments are directly pertinent to the new found relevance the court system had for Jews in Lyakhovichi after the 1864 reforms.
Czarist Russian Voters Lists:
Lyakhovichi Men over 24 Eligible to Vote in 1907 for Duma Representatives
Provided by the Lyakhovichi Research Group
This table is Extracted from the Slutsk Duma List of 1907 compiled by the Belarus SIG. After finding the names of interest to you in the table you can click on this link to the full record they created.
The Duma was the Russian National Parliament set up in 1905. Voters had to meet age, gender, and property standards. The list consists of males aged 24 or older, who met those property standards. In addition to the Jews of Lyakhovichi there are three non-Jews: a Russian (of Orthodox faith) a Pole (presumably Catholic) and a Moslem of Lyakhovichi's Tatar community.
There were four election periods and there is and the additional info for the first and second Dumas appears on Column One of this page. If you can locate and photo duplicate the Minsk Vedomosti listings for the 1912 Duma we would love to publish those images so that our readers could join in the process of extracting the data and making this material generally available!
- 1st Duma: Jan. 1906 to Apr. 1906
- 2nd Duma: Dec. 1906 to Feb. 1907
- 3rd Duma: Sep. 1907 to Oct. 1907
- 4th Duma: Sep. 1912 to Oct. 1912
Russian Passport for Bella Mandel and children (high-resolution version)
This is a joint passport issued for Bella (Strelovsky) Mandel and her two children in 1909. Her husband Abraham Mandel was born in Lyakhovichi in 1871. The document is written in Russian. Page 2 (= top left-hand quadrant) indicates that the bearer of the passport is "Meshchanka" ( "petite bourgeoise") of Ljakhovici (Lechovich/Lyakhovichi), Beila, daughter of Yochil, MANDEL, aged 34, with her children Yankel, aged 8, and Feivel, aged 4.Page 3 (= top right-hand quadrant) indicates that the passport was issued in the city of Minsk on May 29, 1909, for a fee of 15 rubles. This page is signed for the Governor of Minsk and stamped with his seal. Page 4 (= bottom left-hand quadrant): translation in German. Page 5 (= bottom right-hand quadrant): translation in French. This document and its notes are exhibited by Neville Lamdan. Click on Passport Cover to see that page. It was not signed in any language indicating that the holder was illiterate and unable to sign her name. This page was generously shared by Neville Lamdan.
Documents of Lyakhovichi History:
Imperial Russian Revision Lists
There were around eight enumerations of Lyakhovichi's Jews by the Russian government prior to the 1897 All-Russia Census. Incredibly the research efforts of Dr. Neville Lamdan and the acquisition efforts of the informal Lyakhovichi special interest group led by Gary Palgon, has put the period covered in four sequential Revision Lists from 1816 through 1850, (and actually reaching back to people from 1811) on these pages. Their efforts will be continuing as they work to bring on to these pages, the 1874 Revision Lists in which many eventual immigrants to the US appear. Dr. Lamdan has also identified materials from 1796 and 1806 which are being surveyed and made available for further analysis. If the materials are what we hope, then we will eventually be able to offer a continued series of whole-family lists from 1784 (the records of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania Lyakhovichi Poll Tax) from ten to fifteen years apart in time until there is a slightly longer interval to 1874.
The Czarist mandate to create Revision Lists specified a particular period in which they were to take place, but immense geography and unpredictable conditions across such an empire, often moved the completed process off schedule. A Revision List scheduled for 1795 would have stragglers reporting over a period of eighteen months. If in fact we have identified Lyakhovichi's "1795" Revision, the date attached seems to indicate its completion in 1796. This of course, is also impacted by the finalization of the Third Partition of Poland in this time period, towns that were still part of Poland-Lithuania on the scheduled date of the census, were necessarily included late or not at all. 1805 is usually cited as the date of the next count of the Pale, but again, we believe that we will actually find Lyakhovichi's tallies dated 1806. Both 1796 and 1806 are being actively sought for publication on this site.
We published in 2005, the 1816 Revision Lists on this site, titling them for both the 1811 and 1816 periods discussed in the documents. Since previously we had not posted either the month-day-year dates on which each Revision was taken or their file numbers in the Family History Library (or of their ultimate fond and file number in the Minsk National Historical Archives), the webmaster had missed a key point. We have a signed and dated 1816 Revision, that repeated some information originally taken in 1811, but we do not have and are still searching for an extant copy of the 1811 Revision List. This new edition of the 1816 Revision List does considerably more than simply rename the document. We have added maps, local history, and more analysis, for 1816 and for the information reiterated for 1811. You can now see sample images of individual pages accompanying a signed and dated August 1816 Revision List. According to that document, the Russians could find only seventy Jewish families in Lyakhovichi, a couple of hundred people, in both 1811 and 1816. This would have been an incredible shrinkage from a population of seven hundred plus Jews named in a town census in 1784 before the Russian conquest. So the Russian government came back and did another listing after the confusions of the Napoleonic Wars had settled down. The 1819 Revision List identified another two hundred families and the lists started to be more realistic. Our pages show the 1819 documents, including the seven signatures of Lyakhovichi Jewish community leaders who the Russians required to sign and attest to its completeness. Again, this update accompanies the 1819 Revision with more maps, documents, and local history, to add to our comprehension of both the documents and the time period. Some of our new understanding of the 1816 Revision List and its 1819 Supplement, comes from our new experience in processing the documents of the next two major tallies in 1834 and 1850. Women appear to be not reported in 1811 if we were going by the compiled materials offered in 1816, but the 1850 Revision demonstrates that this is likely to be an illusion created in transferring the data reported in the previous Revision List. People who were reported as having died since 1811 are found in the households of many families with surnames different from the deceased, in 1816, which would seem to indicate that there was a tie of some kind between the living and the dead. But the 1834 Revision List shows a common practice of enumerating the dead as if they were part of the households of their neighbors that still had living members. This means that whatever we may learn from the families having been enumerated sequentially previously, we can make no assumptions about any decedant being recorded in the same household. The 1819 Revision List seems to show young married males forming new and separate households; by 1834, the new conscription laws seemed to have swept that innovation away.
The 1834 Revision List is available on microfilm but has never been published previously. The 1850 Revision List is also available in the Family History Library but its data has been laboriously compiled and offered complete to researchers, here, for the first time. Both are here and both have a great deal of new information for us about the Lyakhovichi Jewish community. 1834 is the first Revision List after the new conscription legislation went into effect, where Jewish children could be taken as a reserve draft at age thirteen and then inducted on their eighteenth birthdays for a twenty-five year period of service, all of which years, including those of their childhood, were to be served far from home and amidst constant pressure to induce them to convert. The two Revision Lists name specific men and children recruited, and adults who were absent. 1834, like the earlier Revision List of 1816, duplicates in itself many of the listings made in its predecessor count, while still creating a totally separate enumeration, not simply annotations of the earlier document. It specifies the names of those who have died, or legally transferred residence and it lists for every male whether they were recorded in an earlier Revision List and their age in that earlier tally. 1850, does it all again - accounting for each male recorded in 1834, listing those who have died, removed, or are unaccountably absent. Both 1834 and 1850 list for their primary year covered, all men, women, and children, the relationship of all males to the head of household and and the head's relationship to his own wife and children.
As we find each of these lists, we have an ability to greatly expand our knowledge base. Every Revision List from the 1790s through the 1870s listed all of the household members that the family reported. In comparison, the United States began conducting censuses in 1790 and its seventh census in 1850 was the first to list anyone except the head of family by name! The 1834 Revision List gives us names and ages for over 1100 people. The 1850 and its additions in 1851 come close to 1500 names. Each gives us a new perspective on individuals, their family relationships, and the relations of those families to their neighbors. Come use these valuable resources!
Each of the Revision Lists can be found in the Complete Lyakhovichi Records Catalog. Some of the page images shown are from Revision Lists we have not yet accessed, shared by the generosity of individual donors like Stan Golembe (1850) and Neville Lamdan (1851 and 1874) and Gloria Kay (1914).
1874 Revision List (high-resolution version)
1850 Revision List (1851 Supplement) (high-resolution version)
We again thank Dr. Neville Lamdan for sharing this page which had a separate warranty by the rabbi for an individual reported late for the 1850 Revision List
1850 Revision List (high-resolution version)
Thanks to Stan Golembe for this contribution (long before we were able to access the entire 1850 Revision List) on our page 19th Century Documents.
1819 Revision List (Signature Page) (high-resolution version)
1816 Revision List (high-resolution version)
This last one may not properly be a Revision List at all. It is marked "Family Roll" and "1914" but it looks very similar to the other Revision Lists that we have. The Head of family is Shaya Leibovich Gavza who is 88 in 1914 and he was 49 at the previous Revision List which coincides nicely with the Revision List we know was taken in 1874. If you look at the entire document, it appears that a city official made a legal copy from the official records to give in certification to a soldier who had served between 1914 and the 1917 date of the document. It carries an official seal that is hard to make out on our copy, and it is a pre-printed form filled in by hand. Thank-you Gloria Kay for letting us study your valuable piece of family and Lyakhovichi history!
The family record of Shaya Leibovich Gavza (high-resolution version)
His sons are on the left hand side of the page and his wife and daughters are on the right. The English notes of course were not in the original, but we will happily post your finds in any readable condition!