Rodziny szlacheckie na Litwie w XIX wieku. Powiat święciański i trocki

ENThe first part of the present book, Noble Families in Lithuania in the 19th Century. Districts of Lida, Oshmiana and Vilnius, appeared in 2016 and covered the materials on the nobility of the Lida, Oshmiana and Vilnius districts (powiats) of the former Vilnius Guberniya. Th e present volume is devoted to the districts of Sventainy (Polish: Święciany) and Trakai (Polish: Troki). Two more districts remain to be described and published: the districts of Dzisna (Lithuanian: Dysna) and Vilnius. The area of my interest – the former Vilnius Guberniya – in the times of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth covered three provinces: of Vilnius, Trakai and Polotsk, and a small portion of Minsk and Novogrudok provinces. The region came under Russian rule aft er the second and third partitions of the Commonwealth in 1793 and 1795, and remained under the Russian tsars’ power until the First World War. My main subject of interest is the nobility of this region. However, I neither have the possibilities nor sources to study the entire noble community in Lithuania. Thus, I have limited my search to landowning and settled nobility. I am interested in landowners of noble origin and in urban elites, the clergy, the military and students of noble birth. My study gathers information about the noble families living in the former Vilnius Guberniya in the 19th century, indicating the settlement centres where those families and individuals lived.The publication of the Noble Families in Lithuania in the 19th Century had been preceded by many years of archival research in the Lithuanian State Historical Archives (Lietuvos valstybės istorijos archyvas, LVIA). The most important sources for mapping the settlement of the nobility in the 19th century in the Lithuanian lands are Church records (certificates of birth, baptism, marriages, and deaths), lists of parish inhabitants, inventories (descriptions) of landed estates, and fi nally the vital documentation related to the application of noble families for confi rmation of their noble rights (the legitimacy of the nobility). In Russia, to maintain his privileges of the nobility, every nobleman had to undergo a costly process of official verifi cation of his nobility and present appropriate historical documentation. All these materials are preserved in the fond no. 391 containing the documents produced by the Vilnius Gubernial Chancellery of the Nobility Deputations, supervising the nobility verifi cation process in Lithuania from 1795 on. This is an extremely valuable material for the history of the social elites of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The collected material is arranged alphabetically according to the families’ last names. Individual entries include the following information (there are some entries, however, which contain only some of these data, as it was impossible to find the rest): 1. Last name. 2. Coat of arms (there are families of the same name using different coats of arms). 3. Date of the verifi cation of nobility (the legitimacy of the nobility). 4. Places where the family members lived (or owned lands there). The date of the year (or years) verifi es the family’s presence (ownership) of the places in question. 5. First and last names of the landowners. 6. Information about the number of their subjects (peasants) in their landed estates. 7. Names of the peasants (subjects) inhabiting their estates.8. Information about the area of their estates. 9. The footnotes contain brief biographical notes of more widely known members of the families. An introduction and annexe include several tables with diff erent statistical data, including the demographical data for Vilnius Guberniya in the 19th century (Tables 1 and 2), and the religious structure of individual districts of Vilnius Guberniya in 1851 (Tables 9–15) and 1896 (Table 16). Tables 18–19 provide information on surviving parish registers from parishes of the Sventainy and Trakai districts. I have used these registers to compile this volume. Tables 3–8 contain lists of Vilnius gubernia marshals of the nobility (Table 3) and district nobility’s marshals of the following districts: Lida, Oshmiana, Sventainy, Trakai, and Vilnius (Tables 4–8). The marshal of the nobility headed the noble estate self-governmental body and was elected every three years by the wealthier part of the noble community. Table 17 presents a list of Tatar noble families who confirmed their nobility in the Vilnius Guberniya in the first half of the 19th century. [From the publication]