The Census documents for Russian Empire are actually the Revision Lists.
The Revision Lists
The Revision Lists (Ревизские сказки / Reviska Skazka)
were drawn up in territories ruled by the Russian Czar in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The Revision Lists enumerated only those individuals subject to taxation.
The data was also utilized for identifying men to draft into the army.
There were ten major revisions taken, beginning in 1719 and ending in 1858, but only revisions from 5th to 10th are relevant for Jewish population.
The years of major revisions are: 5th - 1795, 6th - 1811, 7th - 1816, 8th - 1834, 9th - 1850, 10th - 1858.
Each new major revision would indicate changes to the population referenced in the prior revision.
Between the revisions (and after the last one in 1858) were "additional revision lists", used to fill in information missed in the prior major revision.
Further information on the history of Revision Lists can be found
in an article by Boris Feldblyum in Avotaynu XIV:3 (Fall 1998), pp. 59-61,
also available at http://www.bfcollection.net/fast/articles/ruscensus.pdf
Revision List 1858 Example
Here you can see an example of the Revision List of 10th Revision for Mezhyrichi.
The page was completed on May 10, 1858.
You can see that each household record was spreaded onto two pages: the left hand lists males and the right hand lists women. And we can see the same family under the same sequence number.
The first two columns specify sequence numbers in the 9th and 10th (current) Revisions. The third column provide names and relations to the house owner.
The last column on both pages provide the age of this person.
I will explain this on the record of my great-great-grandfather.
His record appears with sequence number 40 in 10th revision (258 in 9th). Then follows his name: Echiel son of Moshko Glickshtein.
His age at previous 9th revision
was 16 and now he is 24. On the right (women) part of the record under the same sequence number you can find the following: Echiel's wife Rechlia age 23; his daughters:
1st Chana age 7 , 2nd Mariam age 4."
And those small girls later become my great-grandmother (Chana) and John Garfield's grandmother (Mariam).
