Parish metric books — the foundation
Metric books are the records parish priests kept of three key events: birth (with baptism), marriage, and death (with funeral). They were maintained from the early eighteenth century until 1918, when the function moved to the civil registry office (ZAGS).
A birth entry contains the date, the name, the parents (with their social class and sometimes their place of residence), and the godparents. A marriage entry contains the ages of the bride and groom, their social class, their parents, and the witnesses. A death entry contains the age, the cause (often a diagnosis), and the burial place.
Metric books are organised by church. To find an entry, you need to know the parish that served the village or district. With pre-1917 church directories, that takes an hour or two of work.
Revision lists — the population censuses
Between 1719 and 1858 the Russian Empire ran ten revisions — population counts for tax purposes. These are lists of every inhabitant with age, household composition, and social class. With revisions you can track a family across more than a century, since there is usually 10 to 15 years between counts.
A quirk: revisions were kept differently for different estates. Landlords' serfs were counted separately from state peasants. Merchants and townspeople had their own ledgers. Nobles were not in the revisions at all — they had separate genealogical books.
Confession registers
Every parishioner was required to confess to a priest once a year. The priest kept a register of who showed up and who did not. These registers fill in the gaps between revisions: they help you check household composition in the off-years and notice when someone left or arrived.
They survive less well than metric books — they were treated as a less important document. For many parishes they are lost. But where they survive, they are gold.
Marriage interrogations
Before a wedding, the priest was required to verify that the bride and groom were not closely related, not already married elsewhere, and free to marry. The resulting document is the marriage interrogation. It contains the names of the parents of the bride and groom, sometimes the grandparents.
This is an exceptionally valuable source when the birth records of the bride or groom are missing. With a marriage interrogation you can jump back a generation that you could not otherwise reach.
Formulary records and service documents
Civil servants, military officers, clergy, and teachers all had service documents kept on them. This is a full work biography: where they studied, where they served, in what rank, what awards, whether they were married, and the children's names.
For clergy these are clerical registers. For officers — formulary lists. For teachers — formulary statements. With these documents you can reconstruct a biography year by year.
How to write the request
Archives are overloaded. A request that says "please find everything on my grandmother Anna Ivanova" will come back as a refusal or a quote for several months of work. A request that gets results includes:
- the specific fond and opis (if you know them)
- the document type: metric book of such-and-such church, revision list of such-and-such year
- a year range: 1850–1860, not "mid-nineteenth century"
- the subject: name, year of birth ±2, social class
- the purpose: establishing kinship between such-and-such persons
