Religious and Cultural Features of Church Records of Civil Statusparish Registers

This article is an attempt to review religious and cultural features and to find published images on the pages of parish registers of different creeds. To determine and study the relevant and cultural features of the information recording in the parish registers, we considered appropriate to consolidate the comparative and historical-cultural method. The interest of scholars and novelty are proved due to the extremely large information potential of the church reports of civil status, considering their large array in the state archives and satisfactory physical status, suitable for appendage.The study of ecclesiastical acts of civil status makes it possible to study the religious and cultural peculiarities via the records characteristic for representatives of different religions. We should separately mention the peculiarities of the entries in parish registers of the Orthodox population regarding the veneration of holy figures according to the church calendar, which impacted the naming of newborns. Jewish records are characterized by the rite of circumcision of newborn boys and records as for a marriage contract (“ksubba / ktubba”).German-language parish registers attract attention to the double names given to newborn babies, the obligation to declare an forthcoming marriage, and the presence of family information in records of the deceased.

The Historical Anthroponymy of the Ruthenian Population Living in the Historical Territories of the Eastern Lublin Region (On the Material of Registers of Parishes in the Former Greek-Uniate Diocese of Chełm)

The subject of research is the anthroponymy of the Ruthenian (Ukrainian) population living in the historical territories of the eastern Lublin region on the Polish-East-Slavic borderland. The underlying objective of the study was to investigate the Ruthenian onomastics functioning in the historical Polish-Ukrainian onomastics and to highlight the territorial diversification of the personal names of Ukrainians, related to the dialectal diversity in the studied territory. The reference database is personal proper names excerpted from the parish registers of Uniate parishes in the former Chełm diocese. The territory investigated was divided into three areas: northern, central and southern, based on the ranges of the Ukrainian dialects spoken in the territory of present-day Poland. The research material was excerpted from the records of Uniate parishes in the former Chełm diocese in the years of 1662–1810. The northern area, defined by the range of Podlasie local dialects, and the central area, determined by the ranges of transitional dialects from northern to southern ones and Volhynian dialects, exhibit features closely similar to peasant anthroponymy, while the southern area, defined by the ranges of Dniester and San dialects, presents features characteristic of the anthroponymy of the lower Ukrainian gentry.

Corpus of Surnames of the Ilek Cossacks (Based on the 18th–19th Centuries Census Material and Parish Registers)

The article discusses the surnames of the Ilek Cossacks — one of the local communities in the Ural Cossack Host. Nowadays, all the surviving settlements of the Ilek Cossacks are located in the southwest of the Orenburg Region, Russia. This community was shaped as a result of the formation of the Ilek fortress in 1737. Therefore, the “age” of the local group of Cossack surnames is not older than this fortress. For a long time, Ilek Cossacks rarely joined other local groups of the Ural Cossack Host. Cossacks from other stanitsas also rarely moved to the villages on the Ilek. This could have contributed to the emergence of a rather peculiar set of local surnames within the Ural Cossack Host. Until now, the surnames of Ilek Cossacks have not become a specific object of study in onomastics or related disciplines, and this paper aims to bridge this gap. Based on eight archival sources for this group of Cossacks, the author made up a list of just over 600 surnames and their variants with further classification. This list allows to solve problems of theoretical and practical nature: to analyze the evolution of the surnames from census to census and to reveal dialectal features in the surnames; to compare this list to the surnames of other communities of Ural Cossacks and various groups of the Russian people. It also lays the groundwork for a future dictionary of surnames of Ilek Cossacks. The most difficult task is the distinction, in the censuses of 1773 and 1817, between surnames and semi-patronymics formed from the full forms of church names. As a solution, the author proposes a method for determining the status of the second elements of anthroponyms such as Ivan Anufriev, Mikhail Avtonomov, Stepan Vasiliev in the books of these censuses.

Genealogy of the Morleys in South Wales: Tracing the Pearce Connection in Cornwall

The origins of individuals or families who moved to Glamorgan from Cornwall during the Industrial Revolution are often unknown, as official records did not appear until 1838 and often the older parish registers are incomplete. This study is concerned with the study of the origins of one such family, called Morley, which was well established in Glamorgan by the mid-nineteenth century. In 1848 in the parish of Michaelston-super-Avon, Thomas Morley, a roll turner in the Copper Miners Tinplate Company located there, married an Anne Pierce who came from Ludgvan in Cornwall. The lineal descendants of their large family, and the antecedents of his family, have been discussed in detail previously, but very little is known about the origins of Anne’s family in Cornwall. This account attempts to correct this omission by exploring her antecedents using the accepted English genealogical practice of tracing the family by following the sequence of family Christian names. This process has enabled the antecedents of her family to be unearthed in southwest Cornwall. Her father, John Pearce (M)1 has been unequivocally identified as a miller from Ludgvan, who was born in 1766 and died in 1827. He married Margaret Winnan of St. Erth in 1800 and they had nine children most of whom were born in Ludgvan. Tracing the identity of John’s father has proved more difficult, as there are several possible candidates born in the expected timeframe. With, it is thought that he was a William Pearce of Gulval who married Elizabeth Gilbert of Helston in 1765. His father in turn was a John Pearce (L) who married Triphosa Donithorne of Gulval in 1727 and they had nine children. The identity of John’s father has not been established with the same degree of certainty and there are two possible contenders, both called John Pearce (K), one born in Lelant in 1692 and the other born in Paul in 1699. On balance, it is thought that the person born in Lelant was the antecedent of John (L) and it is suggested that his father in turn was a John Pearce (J) who was also born in the same parish.