The Roman Catholics of South Siberia and Central Asia: residences and number according to ecclesiastical registers of the second half of19th century

Abstract

In the articleare presented the results of the research of parish registers of the second half of 19th century: the Status animarum of the parishes of Asian part of the Russian empire for the 1860 year and the books of baptism of the Tomskparish for the 1876–1893 years. The object of the research was the residences and the number of the Roman Catholics in South Siberia and Central Asia. These results were compared with the data of the General population census 1897. The lists of the residences permit to reconstruct the map of the principal set- tlements of Catholics lived during the above mentioned time period in the region. In the south part of Tomsk province such settlements were concentrated, first of all, in Mariinsk district, especially in Pochitanskaya, Zyryanskaya, Dmitriyevskaya volosts. In the Central Asia the most numerous catholic groups in 1860 were in Verniy, Kapal, Semipalatinsk and Ust’-Kamenogorsk, and in 1897 – in Bukhara, Tashkent, in Ashkhabad, Merv and Samarkand districts. In the south part of Yenisei province the small groups were registered in Minusinsk and in Abakanskaya volost. In the Trans Baikal provincethe most numerous groups were in Verkhneudinsk, Troitskosavsk, Chita, in Aleksandrovskiy Zavod, Kariyskiye Promisli, Petrovskiy Zavod. The receive dataare useful tocompile the special handbooks and historian maps, as well as for a choice of priority researches’ directions