Minsk City Homeowners List, 1889 and 1911

There are a few abbreviations that the translators cannot figure out yet: "n. ya." and "k. k."  It is possible that the beginning of the book, which we don’t have yet, may have explanations of these abbreviations.  However, they are included in the database.

In the "Comments" column there are some entries with "heirs of person in first three columns".  In this situation, it indicates the unnamed heirs of the person is living in the house and the person in the first three columns was likely to have been deceased by 1889.

Other entries of the name of the person living in the house indicated in the first three columns have the name of the deceased person in the "Comments" column.

The 1889 data uses the term "neighborhood" in place of several Russian terms, not used in the modern division of administrative land areas.  "Urochshche" – is a place different or separated to some extent from the surrounding landscape.  "Sloboda" – a quarter in suburb, mainly with population occupied in the same trade, etc.  All these conglomerations were included in the growing town of Minsk, but they didn't get street names by 1889.  Vitaly checked with the 1911 Minsk Homeowners List and the number of streets doubled.  There were several streets with the same name.  For them Vitaly added chast # (chast – part of the city – refers to the same Police Office).  If the streets were in the same chast – he added (1st), (2nd), etc.  It is especially confusing for Bezymyanny Street, which means "Nameless Street".

The house numbers as used in this database are different from the way house numbers are generally used today.  In 1889, the number was not the real mail address of the home, but just a number in order of how houses stood.  Some of them match the home number of the 1911 Minsk Homeowners List.  Vitaly compared the 1889 List with the 1911 List, when home numbers were already in place and one side of the street had even numbers and another odd numbers (again not always, but in most cases).  Real home numbers were in the same sequence and direction as numbers of 1889.  However, looking ahead – some of the houses had no number at all in 1911.  They had "-" instead of a number.  Vitaly first thought that it referred to the previous home number in the list (a big house with several apartments may belong to several people), but there were cases when the list for a street began with several entries where the home number is "-".

Based on Vitaly’s experience in philately, he knows that home numbers were not in use in most cases for mail delivery in the beginning of the 20th century and weren't mentioned on mail addresses on cards and envelopes.  Only big apartment houses (that were absent in Minsk) used it on a regular basis.  In most cases, addresses were written like this: "Minsk [gubernskiy], Moskovskaya Str. House of Rabinovich, to Mr. A. B. Tsivin".

To get the most benefit from this database, users should search on the surname first and determine the street or neighborhood.  You should then do a search on the street or neighborhood to find other surnames of people who lived there.  This may provide information on family members with different surnames due to name changes caused by the marriage of female children.  When doing a search on a street, you may notice that Jews and non-Jews owned property on the same street.