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The 1905 List of Real Estate Possessors of the District Town of Slutsk, Minsk Province

Surnames starting with I-P

by Oleg Perzashkevich
Funded by donations to the Belarus SIG 

Surnames starting with  A-H  Q-Z

SLUTSK PROPERTY OWNER’S LIST – 1905

By Harry D. Boonin

This listing, when looked at in connection with other listings recently made available to the Belarus SIG, begin to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge of our ancestors and how they lived, especially dealing with how they made a living.  The listing becomes even more meaningful and valuable if you can integrate it into your family  history.

Property owners are listed by family name and given name.  Each property owner is identified as Jewish or Christian.  By counting all the entries, one can calculate the exact percentage in this typical town of Jews and Christians.

The valuation is each property is given in rubles (roubles).  My guess is that this was not the market value but the value set for tax or some other governmental purpose.   My own family lived in Slutsk in 1905.  The Slutsk Property Owner’s List – 1905, states that my grandfather owned a wooden house worth 300 rubles.  When one compares this to the Slutsk Voter’s Registration listing for 1907, this valuation of our family home matches exactly (See, Gospodskaia Duma, Summer 1907; Voter Registration Lists, Avotaynu, Vol. XVI No. 2, Summer 2000,  p. 39, right hand col.). 

Of great interest is the fact that the Slutsk Property Owner’s List – 1905 has a column entitled: “Specification of  Property.”  Many entries in this column read:  “Non-agricultural outside of the most profitable part of town.”   Non-agricultural is another way of saying a “poor European Jewish hovel.”   A typical non-profitable part of town would be Vigoda, the name of a Jewish section to the south of the main business district (See, How and Why I Created a Shtetl Map, by Paul Micheikin Pascal, Avotaynu, Vol. XIII, No. 2, Summer, 1997, pp. 34 to 39, and especially his map of the town of Slutsk on page 36).   This still leaves many things unsaid.  Many families had “gardens” but these gardens were next to their “non-agricultural city homes.”  In these private gardens most Jewish families grew vegetables for their own use.

But many families in Slutsk grew vegetable for commercial sale.  Slutsk was a great agricultural center.  In this connection, there are a few entries that state:  “plot(s) of land, garden, vegetable gardens.”  What is the meaning of this entry?   First, it should be noted that this entry is opposite a “Christian,” for we are told that only Christians were permitted to own agricultural land (it would be interesting to see if any Jews are entered next to such an entry).   As we all know, Slutsk was known as a center for vegetable gardens , especially cucumbers.  Although it is a guess on my part, an entry such as the one above would indicate that the owner did not farm the plot(s) herself, but leased them to the Jews in the summer.  Growing cucumbers was backbreaking work, and the peasants found it too hard and left it to the Jews.  Cucumbers require a great deal of water, and such agricultural garden plots were normally outside of town, which meant in many cases that the Jews had to carry water on their backs for great distances in the summer heat of White Russia.   And when the cucumbers were ready, they all were ready at once which meant that they could be purchased for almost nothing. 

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