Archive for the ‘estonia’ Category
This week the family history website Find My Past has published the central index to the register of merchant seamen on British vessels. The original record series was created by the then Registrar General of Shipping and Seaman (part of the Board of Trade). It is now held on microfiche at The National Archives in Kew, England and can be seen under shelf references BT348, BT349 and BT350.
The resource takes the shape of record cards which form a central index to seamen registered to serve on British-registered vessels within the period from approximately 1918 to 1941.
What makes the Central Index Register cards interesting from an Eastern European genealogical research perspective is that many of those employed in the British merchant navy were engaged at overseas ports. For example, there are large numbers of records relating to Estonian, Greek and Latvian sailors. Additionally, there are smaller but still significant quantities of seamen from Cyprus, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia, and even some from landlocked Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Some of these men may have settled and even become naturalised in Britain but presumably a majority remained citizens or subjects of their country of birth.
The front and back of each index card have been scanned and an online index published so that the records of individual merchant marines can be searched for and located. Two, three or more cards of different dates exist for some individuals.
The cards evolved a little over time, from CR1 to CR2 to CR10 types, and the details recorded changed too. However, the basic format remains the same, as does the core detail of name, year and place of birth, rating, Discharge A Number, ship name and/or official registered number, and date. Some cards give physical descriptions, while others sport a black and white passport-style photograph and signature.
The data is handwritten onto the printed index cards. The handwriting is not always legible and may be faint or contain abbreviations. The place of birth information on the cards will reflect the date at which they were created and the spellings current at that time, sometimes anglicised or misspelt. For example, the Estonian islands of Hiiumaa and Saaremaa often appear as Dagö and Ösel respectively (typically minus their diacritics), being their old Swedish names, and similarly the Saaremaa capital Kuressaare is often given as Arensburg.
This online collection is not a complete record of those sailing on British merchant vessels between the Wars. The majority of cards dating from 1913 to 1921 are known to have been destroyed in 1969. Moreover, a fourth record series at The National Archives (shelf reference BT364) is not being published, on account of data protection and personal privacy concerns. The series BT364 also covers the period 1921 to 1941 and was extracted from the materials that now comprise BT348 to BT350 inclusive. It remains possible that this series, which has also been scanned and indexed, may be released too in due course.
A final note: while some of the individuals contained within these records will have seen service additionally in the Royal Navy at some date, it must be emphasised that the majority would have served only on British merchant vessels and were not in the armed forces.
Who was recruited?
In the early 18th century, the expectation was that one man would be enlisted into the army from every 20 families within a community each year. All social estates, high and low, were liable for military service. However, over the decades many privileges and exemptions were granted so that by 1858 an estimated 20% of the otherwise eligible male population of the Empire was in fact exempt – this included landowners, members of merchant guilds, those with a higher education and the like, but also all those living in specific regions of empire such as Bessarabia. The burden of “other ranks” military service therefore fell heaviest on the peasantry and the urban poor.
How were recruits selected?
In rural Russia, the peasant community itself – the mir – was responsible for putting forward a list of candidates. While the mir or commune probably knew who among its members was eligible for the draft, the undertaking of the Russian censuses, producing the periodic but somewhat irregular revision lists (now of great value to family historians with roots in the former Russian Empire), formalised the process by identifying and recording the population. Unlike censuses in Britain, for example, which were used solely for social planning, the Russian revisions were used explicitly for taxation and conscription purposes.
Each year, the commune produced a shortlist of potential recruits which was then submitted to an army induction centre set up temporarily for the purpose in the nearest town in the volost or uezd (or district). The requisite number of men would then be conscripted into the army, while those not selected could expect to be put forward again the following year. Of course, some men were rejected by the army for not meeting its physical criteria and would unlikely to be conscripted in any year. Others, such as those with disabilities, were deselected by the commune itself and never made the list. To a certain extent, both the commune and the army were sensitive to the fact that each conscript was a lost worker and a lost taxpayer, with the peasants knowing that someone else would have to make up the deficit in labour and money. This meant that there was usually a conscious effort to spare only sons, or only working males in families. In a household of many brothers or sons, it was almost inevitable that one or more would be drafted. However, it was also possible for wealthier farmers to use influence or to purchase a surrogate from a different community to take the place of their brother or son who had been placed on the shortlist. Finally, commune members perceived to be unproductive, or exhibiting anti-social behaviour or committing petty crimes, would be sure to top the shortlist.
While therefore the commune exercised a measure of influence over who was recruited and who not, it is easy to see that the whole process of conscription was a source of stress and tension within each community. This was particularly the case as army service was neither short nor sweet…
How long did a soldier serve in the army?
- Before 1793, a soldier could expect to serve in the Russian army for life.
- From 1793, this was reduced to 25 years.
- From 1834, military service was reduced to 20 years.
- From 1874, the term of service was reduced to 18 years, of which initially the first 5 years were to be spent in the regular standing army and the subsequent 13 years in the reserves. However, later this was changed to 3 years in the army and 15 years in the reserves.
What happened to a new recruit?
Enlistment into the army was a transformational experience. Not only would the recruit very probably leave the vicinity of his native village for the first time but he would be unlikely to return for many years, if at all. Instead, he would be swallowed up into the army corpus, be billeted upon unwilling householders and endure all the hardships of army life which were severe even during peacetime.
However, something else rather peculiar immediately happened to a new recruit. His legal status in Russian society changed. That change was a form of emancipation, albeit deferred until such time as he was discharged from the army. Upon joining the army he ceased to be exposed to any of his former tax or labour obligations, whether to state, church or landowner. Effectively, he was now a free man, just a free man conscripted into the unfreedom of army life.
What about soldiers’ wives and children?
If a recruit was already married, with or without children, the usual scenario was long term separation. There was no easy mechanism for wives and children to go upon the strength, although some managed to continue to cohabit with their men when they were stationed in garrisons or fortresses. Instead, the recruit’s family was subject to great uncertainty and potential hardship. Wives, too, became legally free when the soldier attested. This meant also that they were entitled to an internal passport granting freedom of movement and employment. However, a disproportionate number of wives either drifted into prostitution in towns, or had illegitimate children; some remarried bigamously.
Soldiers’ children were a subcategory in the system of social estates. Sons, including until 1856 the illegitimate children of soldiers’ wives (where the soldier was not himself the father), were registered and expected to enter military service when they came of age.
In Imperial Russia, the status of women and children was determined by that of their husbands or fathers. This is why a soldier’s wife became free when he was recruited. However, this also meant that a soldier’s widow who remarried could become a serf or a peasant owing normal dues once again, and similarly a soldier’s daughter who married a serf lost her free status and became herself enserfed (until emancipation).
Unmarried recruits were of course strongly discouraged from marrying.
What happened to a soldier once discharged from the army?
If a soldier survived the hardships of a full term in the army, he would be discharged to enjoy for the first time and as best he could the freedoms he had acquired when he was recruited. Now he had theoretical freedom of movement; he was exempt from taxation; he did not have to labour for the landlord. However, at the same time he received only a small lump sum and had no immediate means of support. Therefore he was also free to become jobless and hungry and poor. In these circumstances, it was not unusual for a discharged soldier to have to live upon charity, or to become a hawker or a casual labourer, or to struggle to ply a trade. Other old soldiers entered state service as messengers or guards, or in the police or fire services. Additionally, until reforms in 1867, significant numbers of retired soldiers were settled in so-called veterans’ towns or on virgin lands owned or claimed by the state, often in frontier situations.
Others where they could returned to their native village to farm the family plot if it still existed, or to buy a new plot if they had the money. In fact, the 1867 returns henceforth required discharged soldiers to return to the community from which they had been recruited, at least partly to prevent the social problems associated with ex-soldiers which were a growing cause for concern in cities and towns.
Setomaa is a land that does not exist on maps, inhabited by the Seto, or Setu, a small nation which is both threatened by assimilation and experiencing something of a cultural renaissance.
It is divided by the border between Estonia and Russia.
On the Estonian side, the Seto live in Mikitimäe and Värska parishes in Põlvamaa, and in Meremäe and Misso parishes in Võrumaa. A traditional Seto settlement differs from an archetypal Estonian settlement in being a compact or linear village rather than a looser cluster of scattered dwellings and farmsteads. Also, the Seto are Russian Orthodox, rather than the typical Lutheran religion of Estonia, and worship in a distinctive wooden chapel known as a tsässon.
On the Russian side, the Seto live mainly between the towns of Petseri (Pechory in Russian) and Irboska (Izborsk in Russian), which lie on the western edge of Pskov oblast’, part of the Northwestern Federal Okrug of Russia. The Seto are a recognised minority in Russia but this does not prevent assimilation. According to the 2002 census, only 197 Russian citizens declared themselves to be of Setu nationality (there were also some 28,113 Estonians). It is of course likely that some Setu stated that they were Estonian, or indeed Russian, or chose not to declare any nationality.
During Estonia’s first period of independence, from 1920 to 1940, however, before the German and then the Soviet occupation, all of Setomaa was in Estonia, in the then county of Petserimaa with its county town at Petseri. Petseri grew up around its monastery (now known as the Pskovo-Pechersky Dormition Monastery) which, as well as being the major landowner in Setomaa, was the spiritual centre of Russian Orthodoxy among the Seto.
Previously, before WW1, all of Setomaa was in the Pskov gubernia of the Russian Empire. For this reason, the population here died not acquire surnames as the Estonians did during the period from the 1810s to the 1830s. I have read that the Seto did not take surnames until 1921, before then using a Russian style combination of forename and otchestvo (patronymic). This seems late but may well be true. After all, looking further west, not all Swedes had a surname as such until the Släktnamnslagen 1901 made fixed family names compulsory.
Is there a Seto diaspora? Undoubtedly there must be, although I suspect that this is concentrated in Siberia and elsewhere across Russia, rather than in Australia, North America and Scandinavia. Presumably, Seto would have been among the June 1941 and March 1949 Soviet deportations of Estonians to Siberia and the descendants of those who survived and have not returned to Estonia might now exist in the Urals and in the regions of Krasnoyarsk, Novosibirsk and Omsk in Siberia.
Revision lists are the nearest Imperial Russian equivalent to the censuses conducted in places such as Canada, USA and Britain which are so familiar and indispensable to family historians in those regions. While those censuses were intended as a count of the population at a particular point in time and were conducted over a single night or weekend every 10 years, the Russian revision lists were generated for taxation purposes and were more irregular in frequency and duration, with each one tending to take up to a year or more to be completed.
The revision lists, also known as revision of souls, are extremely useful to those genealogists with ancestral roots in the Russian Empire, which of course covered great swathes of territory outside its current borders, for instance in the Baltic and in the modern states of Belarus and Ukraine. The term “revision” derives from the detailed comparison which is being made by the census-takers between the census being undertaken and its immediate predecessor.
Although revision lists evolved and therefore vary over time, essentially each revision list enumerates all residents (or at least all male residents) of a particular place. In the Baltic provinces, with the exception of land owned by church or state, most land was in the hands of a small number of the usually Baltic German elite. Their estates were divided into the demesne (the manor or farm – hof – and its surrounding estate lands) and the peasant farmsteads or smallholdings, all of which were named, and of which there could be a hundred or more on any one single estate. Agricultural labourers lived both on the estate lands and on the smallholdings of other peasants. Those smallholding peasants did not have an opportunity to own their farmsteads until this was made possible by the land reform measures implemented first in 1849 and then ratified in 1860 in Livland (Livonia) and in 1863 in Kurland (Courland). Thereafter, peasant ownership expanded rapidly until by the 1880s most smallholdings were owned by their occupiers.
What the revision lists provide, among other things, for the family historian is evidence of movement. This is because each revision records not just where an individual is resident at that time but also where he or she was resident at the time of the previous revision, if different. For example, the 1850 revision gives where a person was living in the 1833 revision. This of course makes it possible to track a person across time.
It is important to understand that migration in early and mid-19th century European Russia, for instance in the Baltic provinces, was generally local. Usually, we are not talking about emigration beyond Russia or beyond the province, but about small-scale movements of only 2 or 3 km in most cases.
Movement between estates was minimal. Those peasants making such movements were usually young men and women in their twenties getting married. Military conscripts were the only other major group of individuals who moved outside the estate.
Movements within an estate were common. Some smallholders moved to another farmstead, while many agricultural labourers were mobile, even moving annually between different farms on the estate.
A revision list such as the 9th revision in 1850 records departures and arrivals. For those individuals who were present at the time of the previous revision in 1833 and have left since, it records when they left and their destination. For those who were living elsewhere in 1833 and have since arrived, the place of origin is recorded. Just as the 1840 and 1850 American censuses, or the 1841 and 1851 English censuses, show only where individuals were living at those two dates, and are silent on any movements in between, so the 1833 and 1850 revision lists only plot where a person was at these two dates, not any interim places of residence. For instance, an agricultural labourer could quite conceivably have moved every year between the two revisions but will only be recorded on them at the two qualifying dates of 1833 and 1850. This also means that a person who is at the same place in 1833 and 1850 may of course have lived elsewhere in between but returned. The family historian must therefore accept that they are only being presented with snapshots in time and not with an unbroken seamless record of movement. Nevertheless, the significance of the revision lists cannot be under-estimated for those researchers investigating their ancestors and the structure and composition of family trees in the Russian Empire in the 19th century.
In the Russian Imperial provinces of Livland (also known as Livonia) and Kurland (also spelt Courland), the peasantry obtained surnames over a process of years between the 1810 and the 1830s (the so-called period of name-giving). It is worth a genealogist with roots in this region taking the time to understand the background to this process, as it may explain certain facts or why the family historian is confronted with a potentially insurmountable brickwall in their Latvian research.
The Livland and Kurland countryside were dominated by Baltic German landowners, with a scattering of Polish and Russian counterparts. The land was essentially divided up into large estates, which in turn contained individual farmsteads as well as the generic estate lands. Some of the peasants were effectively heads of farmsteads, notwithstanding the fact that they themselves, as serfs, were the property of the estate owner, to whom they paid dues. Other serfs were agricultural labourers who worked on the estate and/or farmstead lands. Both types of serf were legally bound to their owner on the estate, although movement between individual farmsteads was common for the agricultural labourers. Neither type of serf bore a surname; rather, they would be known by a combination of their first name and the name of the place (usually the farmstead rather than estate) to which they belonged. Sometimes, the name of the father might be used as a qualifier to differentiate between individuals of the same forename on the same farmstead.
The legal process of the landless emancipation of the serfs took place between 1816 and 1819, although of course its implementation on the ground in the provinces occurred over a period of time extending into the mid-1820s and beyond. The serfs were freed but were freed without land. This meant that although they had legal freedom of movement, including the right to move between estates, they tended to remain on the land they had worked in recent generations and which was still owned by the landowners; they had no land of their own to buy or sell.
The process of taking surnames took place concurrently with emancipation for families and individuals. The process was controlled by newly created peasant courts set up at county (pagasts) level. Once chosen, names could only be altered by approval of the court. Details respecting the old and the new names were entered into court minutes along with details of emancipation. Unfortunately, survival of these minutes and of manorial rolls confirming the new surnames is far from complete.
The state set down both rules and guidelines, refined a number of times in the early 1820s, for the taking of family names.
The head of a farmstead was responsible for choosing the name which would be borne by him and his lineal descendants. The name selected by a man in his 50s or 60s would therefore cascade down to his living children and grandchildren and thereafter to his as yet unborn remoter issue. However, if this family elder had already died and, instead, there were a number of adult sons in, say, their 30s or 40s, each of these brothers was free to choose their own surname. This means that while they may all have taken the same surname, this was not always the case – siblings may bear different surnames.
The agricultural labourers and the peasants employed solely on estate lands acquired their surnames generally at a somewhat later date than the farmsteaders.
One of the rules established early on, in 1822, was the prohibition on taking the surnames of the German landowners, other nobility and what we would now call celebrities, who clearly did not feel flattered when a newly liberated serf graced himself with their grand and distinguished name.
By 1824, guidelines were being issued on what were regarded as appropriate and acceptable surnames. Peasants were encouraged to take surnames with a literal meaning in the local Latvian vernacular, rather than Germanic names. A suitable name might be that of the farmstead upon which they lived and worked. Also, given the small pool of forenames used in most rural communities, the authorities tried to dissuade peasants from assuming names based on patronymics, so as to avoid a plethora of families adopting the surname Jansons after men named Janis, Jēkabsons named after Jēkabs, Pētersons named after Pēteris, and so on.
But these were only guidelines and in most cases the peasantry was able to select a surname of its own choosing without intervention from the authorities. The existence of unflattering names derived from physical appearance or character suggests that some were assigned to the individuals concerned by the court or even the landowner, perhaps because their own suggestions were rejected, or they could not decide, or were in such reduced circumstances that they were not in a position to exercise choice – we will never know. However, most names were indeed based upon the identity of the farmstead, or taken from nature (trees, birds, animals and geographical features), or from patronymics. Surprisingly perhaps, contrary to what we might expect from most European surname dictionaries, only a relatively small proportion of names were occupationally derived.
To see the rolling out of surnames, one need only compare the 7th, 8th and 9th revision lists, carried out respectively from 1815/16 (in some places not undertaken until as late as 1826), from 1833 and from 1850. The revisions were those Imperial Russian censuses enumerating the individuals living on estates – the term “revision” refers to the comparison between the present census and its immediate predecessor, noting the changes caused for instance by death and in- and out-migration from an estate. The 7th revision usually shows very few surnames. However, by the time of the 8th, a great many peasants had acquired surnames and the process is fully complete by the 9th revision in 1850.
For an in-depth study of the period of name-giving in Latvia as it affected one particular Livland estate, please see the excellent and very readable article “Patrilines, Surnames and Family Identity”, by Andrejs Plakans and Charles Wetherell, published in The History of the Family, vol 5 no 2, in 2000.
In the territories which were to become what we now call Estonia – the Russian provinces of Estland and Livonia (also known as Livland) – burials in churchyards were forbidden from 1772, at least in theory. The legislation was passed primarily for reasons of public health and sanitation. Henceforth, new burial grounds had to be beyond the immediate settlement. Of course, over time, settlements expand and therefore eventually such burial grounds were often enveloped within a growing town.
The Russian subjects of Estland and Livonia responded in different ways to the new laws.
The Baltic German elite – the landowners, the merchants and of course the Evangelical Lutheran clergy itself – had traditionally been interred in the immediate vicinity of the churches or even within the church itself. Many landowners now responded by establishing their own private family cemeteries on their estates, usually close to the manor and perhaps with a small chapel attached. They were emulated towards the end of the 19th Century by a growing number of ethnic Estonian landowners, who set up small family graveyards close to their farmhouses.
Of course, the German merchant classes, without land, were laid to rest along side the native Estonian population in the Lutheran parish cemeteries which sprang up. Not infrequently there was more than one burial ground within a large parish, for instance a cemetery might be created beside an outlying chapel of ease. Most family historians with Estonian ancestors will find them buried in these parish cemeteries.
There are some exceptions, however. During the 1840s there was a succession of crop failures and up to 65,000 Estonians are thought to have converted from Lutheranism to the Orthodox religion of Imperial Russia. There had always been Orthodox communities in the territories of Estonia – for instance, in the Setu villages of the SE, and in ethnic Russian settlements in the north-eastern Alutaguse district near what is now the border town of Narva. However, the mass conversion of peasantry in the years 1845 to 1848 created a swathe of Orthodox communities and therefore burial grounds, especially across northern Livonia. The conversions seem to have been a response to economic conditions and represented a switching in allegiance from the German Lutheran nobility which owned most of the land to the Russian Orthodox Tsar, in the hope that the latter would alleviate their distress and ameliorate their living conditions. Later in the 19th Century, there were further conversions in Estland, these being less voluntary and more driven by the pressures of the Empire’s Russification programme.
Estland was generally the poorer of the two provinces. As the peasantry had been emancipated landlessly in the 1810s, they were in practice usually tied to the estates upon which they had previously worked as serfs. Only a tiny percentage moved annually to neighbouring or more distant estates: it has been estimated that only 1% of the peasants in Estland moved between 1835 and 1849. Restricting as this was at the time, it is a great boon to family historians today, as it provides continuity of residence in a parish (kihelkond) and it is generally safe for a genealogist to make such a working assumption when conducting ancestral research during this period unless and until evidence emergence to the contrary.
For more detailed information on the various types of cemetery in Estonia, see the article “The Formation and Location Features of Estonian Cemeteries” published in Journal of Baltic Studies in 2006 (volume 37, issue 3).
The situation of the peasantry in the 19th century Russian Empire is much more complex than generally thought, and a genealogist with ancestors in the territories of rural Russia should be aware of this complexity so as to better understand the likely circumstances under which their ancestors may have lived.
Firstly, it is not true to think of the peasantry as being a single undifferentiated mass, or to say that all peasants were serfs. The Russian Empire was expanding in all directions at the start of the 19th century. The Poles in the Partition were not enserfed when they came under Tsarist jurisdiction; nor were the Finns after 1809 or the Bessarabians after 1812. Furthermore, where serfdom had previously existed in the Baltic, it began to be modified, first in Livonia (or Livland – roughly the north of modern day Latvia and the south of Estonia), where there were reforms in 1804, and then in Estland (today’s northern Estonia) and Courland (or Kurland, western and southern Latvia) where there was landless emancipation of the serfs during the years 1816 to 1819. This introduces another point worth emphasising: emancipation did not necessarily lead to increased prosperity and, in fact, the opposite was true in these Baltic regions – the serfs were freed without being gifted or sold land and therefore became more destitute than they had been before the reforms.
Elsewhere in the empire, most minorities, such as the free agriculturalists, were not subject to serfdom, something that the Russian peasantry did not understand and which could cause resentment – why should German colonists, for example, be free when native Russians were not?
Secondly, there were different types of peasant in the lands of Imperial Russia.
There were state peasants, who were literally owned by the state and worked upon state lands. They were the responsibility of the Ministry of Finance and later, from 1837, the Ministry of State Properties. Although state peasants enjoyed some rights and freedoms (for example, they could acquire smallholdings of their own and even become civil servants), they had to pay taxes, maintain roads and supply recruits to the army. Moreover, the state was a largely indifferent owner and did not invest in its properties.
Then there were privately-owned serfs, who were the property of the landowning aristocracy and gentry. Absentee landowners often left an estate manager in charge, not infrequently to exploit the serfs on the estate. Some landowners permitted their serfs to remit in cash not labour dues – in other words, instead of working upon the landowner’s estate, they could leave the land and go to work in a town or city, and pay their owner in lieu. Of course, while some serfs made a substantial amount of money and were able to purchase their freedom, the majority remained upon the land in reduced circumstances.
The serfs in Russia were emancipated from 1861. Unlike in the Baltic region of the empire in 1816, the serfs were able to purchase their dwelling and land, so as to become independent smallholders. As redemption prices for the privilege of emancipation were way beyond the means of many serfs, the state lent them monies at 6% annual interest for up to 49 years, thereby creating a generation of peasants perpetually in arrears to the state.
Then there was the issue of military service. By 1815 the Russian Army was 1 million strong and the state, entering peacetime, was apprehensive of demobilisation and its impact upon communities across Russia and its potential for unrest. At this point, it needs to be explained what military service entailed. Men were recruited at aged 20 years for a period of 25 years (reduced to 15 years from 1834). Once enlisted, a serf became a free man in law; hence, once demobbed he would be his own man, with no immediate source of employment but with the experience of handling a weapon. To mitigate the risks that this entailed, the army found ways of making military service mean life service, not releasing men at the end of their term (for instance, by imposing extra service as a penalty for the many disciplinary offences).
Between 1815 and 1858, the state found an ingenious way of dealing with demobilisation and managing the risk to stable civilian life of releasing ex-soldiers into the community. So as not to demobilise troops, agricultural “military colonies” were established. Previously uninhabited state land was colonised by a mixture of soldiers and state-owned peasants commandeered from elsewhere. The soldiers retained the status of soldiers, although in their everyday lives they became agricultural labourers working for the state peasants. The army was therefore kept at full strength and made economically productive and self-supporting. Furthermore, the reserve army was strengthened because of the newly acquired status of the state peasants residing in these military colonies. The head of the household and the eldest son remained state peasants. However, younger sons were classed as military canonists (the term used for sons of soldiers during their minority) and joined the reserve at aged 18 years. It is estimated that by 1825 over 750,000 soldiers and families had been settled on these military colonies in areas such as Mogilev, Novgorod and St Petersburg, as well as in the southern region of Ukraine.
Much has been written about Jewish aversion to military service and, of course, the Jews shared the same reasons as the Russian peasantry for not being keen on being conscripted into the army, plus had plenty more valid religious reasons of their own. In fact, the Jewish population of the Russian Empire was not subject to military service until 1827. However, from then on, the state pursued a russification programme for the Jews and required them to be available for service from aged 12 years. Community elders had to select the recruits whenever demanded each year and of course this led to tension and frequent flight to evade the draft.
It is interesting to note that the infantry divisions of the Russian Army tended to be garrisoned around the periphery of the empire, especially in the west. While therefore there might be a solitary division in the Caucasus, or one in Orenburg towards the restless Kazakhstan, the vast majority were stationed in occupied Congress Poland and the westernmost gubernia of Russia (areas now in Belarus’ and Ukraine) where there was a perceived and sometimes a very real threat of politically or economically driven internal unrest.
From the mid-1820s the small Estonian seaside town of Haapsalu began to develop into a resort, attracting tourists from St Petersburg, Moscow and elsewhere in the Russian Empire, as well as visitors from abroad, especially Germany.
Picture postcards from the 19th and early 20th century generally carry titles and descriptions in Russia or German, often both, sometimes also in French, but never in Estonian. The town is called Hapsal or, transliterated from the Russian Cyrillic, Gapsal’, the Russians at that date using a hard G for the soft H in foreign proper nouns.
The names of buildings, shops and streets in postcards of old Haapsalu show the marked Germanic influence prevalent throughout Russian Estonia. For example, Bergfeldt’s Baths, the publisher Eduard Siegfeldt, Marie Schmidt’s haberdashery shop, the Pension Rosenberg, the Villas Friedheim and Wenden, and so on. However, sometimes these names can be misleading, as many ethnic Estonians bore Germanised names: for example, the artist Hans Laipmann, who went to school here, later became, in 1935, Ants Laikmaa. But it is true that many of the Haapsalu locals who benefitted from the resort status of their small town were ethnic Germans rather than Estonians or, for that matter, Swedes, who lived there also.
When I stayed in Haapsalu in 2006, few tourists were in evidence and most of these were Estonians, Finns and Swedes, at least some of the last perhaps interested in their Aiboland (or, in Estonian, Rannarootsi or “coastal Swedish”) roots. In the harbour district of Haapsalu there is a modest and seemingly little-visited museum dedicated to the now much diminished Swedish community of Noarootsi vald and the other parishes in Läänemaa county in NW Estonia (the great majority of whom – some 8,000 – fled during the Second World War).
The Estonian areas – Estland, northern Livland or Livonia – of the Russian Empire in the 19th century were dominated by the Baltic German elite until the russification programme of the late 1880s started to shift power away from them. Nobility, landowners, merchants and clergy were all German. Estonians constituted the peasantry and craftsmen in the countryside and the labouring poor in the towns. Those few upwardly mobile Estonians learnt the German language and usually took German names.
Serfdom was abolished in the period 1816 to 1819, initially in Estland and then in northern Livland. However, this was not the same as land reform: land was not redistributed to the peasantry and the peasants remained tied to the great estates with limited personal freedom and the obligation to labour for the landowner. Very few peasants moved to a different estate, let alone to the towns. The only Estonian peasants likely to move away from their places of birth in the first half of the 19th century were those conscripted into the Russian army for 25 years.
The taking of surnames among the peasantry followed the abolition of serfdom. Surnames are generally thought to have been given to the peasants, rather than taken by them. Usually they were given to a family by the landowners or by the clergy or parish clerks at the time of baptisms and marriages; the taking of surnames took place gradually and continued over the course of years into the 1830s. Where branches of families lived on different estates or farms, or were given names at different dates, they usually received different surnames. Names were derived from the usual sources – patronymics, occupations, places of residence (derived from the name of the manor or farm, or descriptive of the location), physical attributes, nature and so on – but also more talismanic and whimsical names. Often the names were Germanic rather than Estonian.
It is usually possible to research Estonian family history confidently back to the period of the assigning of surnames and, with luck and patience, beyond this date using family reconstruction techniques based upon the parish registers and revision lists. However, before the 1820s/30s personal records usually identify an individual through a combination of his own personal name, his father’s name and his paternal grandfather’s name (with women often described as being wife, widow or daughter of a particular man). The picture can be complicated further by the assigning of the name of the manor, the farm or the farmer to an individual.
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In the 1930s, Estonia underwent an estonianisation campaign, one aspect of which was the encouraged changing of names for those whose surnames were not already authentically Estonian. The campaign needs to be placed in context. Firstly, this was a nation state newly independent after centuries of rule by Imperial Russia and, more locally, by Baltic German landowners. Secondly, many of the surnames which had been given to or acquired by the native Estonians were Germanic and dated from the 1820s and 1830s. The estonianisation policy should therefore be viewed primarily as an assertion of national identity. This is not to say that Estonian politics was not moving to the right in the 1930s, or to deny that there were unintended victims such as the Finns and Swedes who also lived within the borders of inter-War Estonia.
Between 1920 and 1934, only 820 names were spontaneously estonianised. Estonianisation of names effectively began in 1935, in which year there were approximately 34,000 name changes; by 1940, there had been about 200,000. Some of the new surnames were translations or equivalents of the old names, but others were simply chosen for their attractive sound, meaning or association.
One example is the common Estonian surname Rebane. In English, this surname means “fox”. Records show that Estonians with, for example, the surnames Fuchs, Fuks and Tokmann took the new family name Rebane in 1938, 1938 and 1936 respectively. Of course, others of those names took different new names: for example, other people named Tokmann became Laiamäe, Rahula and Toim. Therefore, whole blood siblings could suddenly possess different surnames, and conversely Estonians bearing a rare name might be completely unrelated. (This was true also at the time Estonians took family names in the 1820 and ’30s).
Following the Soviet occupation, maybe 45,000 or more russianised ethnic Estonians moved to the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. These Estonians were sometimes called Yeestlased (in English, “Yestonians”) reflecting their characteristically Russian pronunciation. Some of these were immigrants (having been born outside Estonia) and others returnees (having left Estonia at an earlier date). Some went native and estonianised their names to better assimilate in post-War society although, given the Soviet domination of the country, there was little or no pressure upon them to do so – rather the reverse, Estonia was to be sovietised.
11 communities of Russian Old Believers (starovery) remain within the borders of modern Estonia. Nine of these are situated around the lake known in Estonian as Peipsi järv and to the Russians as Chudskoe: Kallaste, Kasepää, Kolkja (two parishes), Kükita, Mustvee, Piirissaar, Raja and Varnja. These are the Prichudie (“by Chudskoe”) parishes. The other two are in the capital Tallinn and in the university town of Tartu.
Like the Amish in America, the Old Believers are a throwback to an earlier age, maintaining a life of simplicity and religious observance. Those in Estonia arrived in the late C17th, from cities such as Moscow and Novgorod, following persecution in the Russian heartland. An early monastery was established at Räpina but was destroyed in 1719. Persecution sought out the Old Believers again during the reign of the reactionary autocrat Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855) and there was pressure to conform to the Russian Orthodox Church: Old Believers were forbidden to baptise, marry or bury according to their own rites. They were not officially recognised and tolerated until a religious freedom act of 1905.
The Prichudie communities were largely self-contained but had connections with co-religionists in, for example, Pskov and Moscow, and in Rīga and Vilnius. The inter-War independence of Estonia, and the drawing of an international border north to south bisecting Peipsi, made communication with communities in Soviet Russia difficult. The annexation of Estonia into the militantly atheist USSR created greater problems – for example, many Old Believers were deported to Siberia in March 1949, although some were able to return after the Thaw following the death of Stalin in 1953. Yet the Old Believers and their customs survived the turmoil of C20th and remain largely intact today in their fishing and onion-growing villages on the edge of Lake Peipsi in re-independent Estonia.
There is of course, as well as a population in Russia, an Old Believer diaspora abroad, in Canada, USA and Australia, established in the C19th and C20th. However, because of the various doctrinaire schisms within the starovery themselves, it is not clear how these often discrete communities are inter-related in family history terms and how many, if any, of these have direct kinship with the Estonian population. Records in state archives in Tartu and Tallinn appear to be extensive and there would seem to be good prospects for family history research for anyone knowing or believing themselves to have roots in this small but fascinating community.
The February 1940 Estonian telephone directory is a fascinating volume, as it was issued four months before the June 1940 Soviet occupation which ended the nation’s first period of independence. It is a piece of ephemera which inadvertently acquired historical significance. Estonia’s experience of WW2 was grim. First, it was savaged by the Soviets, enduring executions and mass deportations to labour camps. Then, in July 1941, the Wehrmacht invaded. Einsatzgruppe A murdered those Estonian Jews who had not already been deported by the Soviets or fled to Russia, and the Nazis declared Estonia Judenfrei in January 1942. The Soviets returned in the autumn of 1944 and many Estonians fled in advance, withdrawing with the defeated Wehrmacht towards Germany, or fleeing across the Baltic to Finland and Sweden.
The 1940 phone directory is therefore the last to show the broad cross-section of Estonian society prior to World War Two. As well as Estonians, there are many Baltic German, Jewish, Russian and Swedish names.
My copy was once in public use, possibly hanging in a post office by the public telephones. Pages 5 to 32 are carefully excised with a sharp knife, as apparently is usually the case with surviving copies of this volume. These were the pages which included, among other things, details of foreign embassies in Tallinn: the Soviet authorities did not wish those numbers to be publicly available.
The directory is in three sections: i) the capital Tallinn, ii) the major towns, such as Pärnu and Tartu, and iii) the smaller communities (many of which have only a tiny number of subscribers).
We are happy to provide free look-ups to family historians upon receipt of a surname and place of residence.