The Ural Population Project: Demography and Culture from Church Records in a European-Asian Border Region

Elena Glavatskaya, Ural Federal University
Gunnar Thorvaldsen, UiT - Arctic University of Norway
Elizaveta Zabolotnykh, Ural University
Julia Borovik, Ural University

For many decades, historians at the Ural Federal University have studied the religious culture of the Urals region, particularly focusing on the ethnic minorities. More recently, we have added transcriptions of late 19th and early 20th century nominative church records into the Ural Population Project (URAPP) database as central source material. This has enabled research about historical demography, so far mortality and nuptiality, while we are now opening up for fertility studies, and attempting record linkage. We are intrigued that the nominative sources provide unexpected insights also into our traditional religious studies, for instance highlighting interreligious and interethnic marriages and baptism of children only a couple of days after birth in the Russian Orthodox Church parishes, which may help explain the high infant mortality rate in the country. We shall present both the URAPP and the main findings based on its analyses as well as the challenges we are facing.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 76. Social and professional Trajectories as reflected in the new European databases