Parish registers are the principal source of reliable documentary information for building a family tree, compiling a family history and studying the history of a lineage. They were kept by various institutions and, although the entries were similar in substance and content, the appearance of the books and the wording of the records differed.
Parish registers recorded the principal events in every person's life — baptism, marriage and burial — in the form of chronological entries. Until the middle of the 19th century all types of registration were kept together in Orthodox registers; later they were separated into individual books.
Types of parish register:
- consistory copies (the archives hold substantial consistory volumes running to 1,000–1,200 leaves and containing the registers of deaths, births and marriages for every parish of a single town or district for one year);
- parish copies (these held the records of registrations in a single parish over a number of years).
What information can be found in an archive of parish registers?
- on birth (baptism) — the full dates of birth and baptism, the child's given name and surname (registers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries also named the saint's day), the place of residence, the father's occupation, whether the birth was legitimate, and the estate and religion of the godparents and of the child's parents;
- on marriage — the exact date of the wedding ceremony, the given name, surname, place of residence, nationality and religion of the bride and groom, which marriage it was for each of them, their age at marriage, the names of the witnesses and the name of the priest who performed the ceremony;
- on death — an archive of parish registers offers detailed information about the deceased: given name and surname, social estate, place of residence, age at death, the exact date and cause of death, the date of burial and the place of interment.
