“Census of Catholics” in the Zoludek parish from 1700

Łukasz Lubicz-Łapiński

Waldemar Wilczewski

Abstract

The Catholic Census is a list of the faithful, belonging to the parish in Zoludek (currently in Belarus, Grodno oblast, Shchuchyn area). The register provides information on the number of people in individual households divided by faithful adults – receiving the sacrament of penance, and children – not receiving it. The faithful were listed according to the towns they lived in. The goods of Zoludek, located on the right bank of the Neman river, within the Lida district and deanery, were the property of the monarch until the second half of the 16th century. Then, probably during the reign of Sigismund Augustus, the goods fell into the hands of the Sapieha family. The subsequent owners of Zoludek were the Frackiewicz family, the property was offered as a dowry by Anna Sapieha, who married Michal Frackiewicz in 1584. At the turn of the 17th and 18th centurie, Zoludek became a property of the Tyzenhaus family, again as a dowry. The parish church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Zoludek was founded in 1490 by Casimir Jagiellon. The temple belonged to the middle class and did not stand out from the other churches in the deanery. In 1700, the parish was composed of 43 towns. Only two villages were south of the Neman. Most of the towns were located on both sides of the Lebioda river, the right tributary of the Neman. The villages inhabited by Catholics belonging to the parish in Zoludek were adjacent to the villages of the Uniate people. In the parish, apart from the church, a chapel in Krasula, and a Carmelite monastery in Zoludek, there were seven Greek Catholic churches, an Evangelical church and a Jewish synagogue. The discussed population register may be an important resource for research on demographic phenomena, linguistics and genealogy. The manuscript comes from a book containing visitation records of the Vilnius diocese churches, mainly from the years 1700-1717, to which numerous documents concerning these churches and parishes were attached. The volume, with the misleading title Acta visitationis ecclesiarum decanatus Augustoviensis ex speciali mandato Constantini Casimiri Brzostowski [...] episcope Vilnensis [...] anno Domini 1700 collecta, is stored in the Czartoryski Library in Krakow (reference number: 1775 IV).