Volosts and most important settlements of the Empire, 1884

As you possibly know, the Gubernias of the Russian Empire have been divided into uyezds and uyezd have been divided into volosts (earlier - povets).

To know this is quite important because from my experience some records refer not to a town/village but to uyezd or volost. If you know the volost and know that there are (as usual) one Jewish settlement - you will know what the records are about. In most cases the volost name derived from one of the local settlements, but not necessary the town you looking for.

The data listed below is for the towns and villages of the Minsk Gubernia with references to administrative division of the Gubernia in early 1880s.  I mostly used data from "Volosti i vazhneishie seleniya Imperii, vyp. V" - (" Volosts and most important settlements of Empire, 5th edition) of 1884 and several other sources.

I selected more than 500 settlements (most of them with populations of 300 people and more) and show the names of the volost and uyezd that they belonged to.  I also marked (in red) settlements where I had information about Jewish communities or just percents of Jewish population at the time (1884).  Earlier or later in time, the picture could be different.

I was puzzled by the absence of reference to such well known Jewish settlements as Shchedrin (Seliba) of the Bobruisk uyezd. Possibly some other location are missing.

In the data below, I left the volosts names in the form of feminine adjectives in nominative case as it written in Russian. So, for example,  Lyakhovichi volost will be vritten as Lyakhovichskaya [volost] - I thought it will help in the work with the documents.

Vitaly Charny
Birmingham, AL