Mortality of the Orthodox Adult Population in Ekaterinburg during the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

Abstract

Traditionally, studies of historical mortality have focused on the national, regional, or local levels. Currently, the creation of individual level databases has made it possible to study mortality at the individual and family levels, also following people over generations. However, this research rarely considered non-family relations; at the same time, rapid urbanisation during the late nineteenth century severed many family ties and hindered the transmission of traditional models for demographic behaviour. Thus, the role of non-family factors increased, the main of which was the church parish, which since the end of the nineteenth century gradually transformed into a neighborhood community — the prototype of the urban microdistrict. This research aims to study the mortality of the adult population of Ekaterinburg during the decades around 1900, differentiating between the parishes of the Russian Orthodox Church. The sources consist of official statistics and the Ural Population Project database, which was created based on the metric (church) books. The authors reconstruct the full development of mortality for each parish and for Ekaterinburg as a whole; map the structure of mortality, calculate the average age at death, as well as analyse the causes of death and its seasonality. As a result, it may be concluded that each of the five Orthodox parishes indeed had a certain demographic specificity. Mortality was influenced by the economic profile of the area and the trend of urban development, where the location of social facilities on the territory of each parish was of great importance.