bluebird research

The family historian in the British Isles or North America or Australia is accustomed to high quality registration of birth, marriage and death and expects to be able to find most 19th and 20th century vital events in either civil or ecclesiastical registers. These expectations should not be carried over wholesale to research in Central and Eastern Europe. While births, marriages and deaths were registered in one form or another in much of the eastern half of continental Europe from the mid-19th century, if not earlier, registration would not have been comprehensive in most parts, survival of records is not guaranteed and access restrictions mean that 20th century records in particular can be difficult to obtain. 

In Russia it seems likely that there was chronic under-registration, particularly of deaths, before the 1917 Revolution. Mortality rates were not just the highest in Europe but were in excess of those in the poorest sub-Saharan and Asian states today. The urban and rural poor died of malnutrition, alcohol poisoning, cholera and typhus, tuberculosis. In other senses, it is probably also true to say that they died from lack of education and certainly from state indifference. Famines in 1891/92 and in 1906 killed millions of often displaced people in southern Russia and in what is today Ukraine. The country was undergoing rapid urbanisation and labourers converged on Kiev, Moscow, Odessa, St Petersburg and other fast-growing cities. Economic migration, which was primarily male, might be seasonal – the taking of a job for six months – but equally it could last for several years, dividing families. According to the 1897 census, only an astonishing 3.8% of heads of household in the working class districts of Moscow were married males living with their wives (Barbara Alpern Engel, Between the Fields and the City, Cambridge, 1996). This also explains the frequency of illegitimate births back in the rural villages, where wives were often separated for years from husbands who were either labouring in the cities or serving in the army. 

While during normal times parish priests in the countryside probably registered burials when they could, it is likely that at least infant deaths often passed unrecorded. However, in years of economic hardship or famine, when large sections of the population became itinerant in search of employment or food, the proportion of under-recorded deaths must have soared. More to the point, in a jurisdiction without centralised registration, even were the death of an internal migrant on the road to be recorded in a parish burial register, there is no way of identifying that place of death from the unlinked records of the originating village. 

So where does this leave the family historian with Russian roots? Perhaps it is true to say that you will be at an advantage if your family was not mobile but, rather, firmly settled in either a village or in a city. It is also probably true to say that your task will be easier if your ancestor was from the emerging professional middle class or from the upper class strata of society than if they came from the urban proletariat or the peasantry. Finally, research will quite likely hold better prospects if the family were not Russian Orthodox but, say, Lutheran or Jewish, as it is not unlikely that the minority faiths kept better community records.