Abstract

Little is known about kinship ties within villages and peasant communities in Russia in the second half of the 18th century. Yet the research on these links would undoubtedly help to better understand the peasant life, almost entirely enclosed within the limits of the village and rural community. The most informative source for studying kinships in the Russian Empire is census lists compiled since the first half of the 18th century. They indicate the inhabitants of every homestead and family ties inside it. Starting from the third census list of the 1760s, these documents contain information not only about the male, but also about the female part of the population, and allow establishing the network of family ties with a high degree of accuracy by comparing several census list for the same territory over different years. The article deals with one of the estates in Moscow guberniya on the basis of the third (1762) and fifth (1795) census lists. For the analysis, macros were developed in Visual Basic for Applications, integrated into Microsoft Office Excel. Thus, the authors created a chain of kinship ties and a database with more than 2 million pairs of relatives with the indication of the type of relationship (consanguinity or affinal relationship) and the range of relationship for each of them. The database helps identify the number of relatives for any person, establish the existence of family ties between households and determine the “density” and equitability of kinships. According to the census lists, more than 95 percent of the population in the area in question was linked by kinship ties. The proportion of blood relatives for different inhabitants ranges from 0 to 11 percent. Most of them lived in neighboring settlements. Application of this methodology in combination with the use of local patrimonial archives provides entirely new and extremely wide opportunities for studying the peasant life and world.