Solombala Admiralty Settlement in 1850-1861: Demographic Aspects of the History of a Military Parish

The author examines the demographic and medical aspects of the existence of the military parish of the Transfiguration Naval Cathedral in the Solombala Admiralty settlement, a parish church for military personnel and officials of the Military and Naval Departments of the Russian Empire and members of their families. The source base is archival documents (above all, parish registers), as well as official statistical handbooks on the settlement. There is essentially no other historiography on this subject. The article is interdisciplinary and utilizes historical demography, examining the birth rate, number of marriages, and mortality statistics for 1850, 1855, 1860, and 1861. There is also data on postmortem diagnoses with an analysis of the recording system. As a result of the analysis of parish registers and other sources, the author concludes that the military parish of the Solombala Transfiguration Naval Cathedral was demographically different from the population of the Solombala Admiralty settlement, since the parishes were divided, and separate statistics were kept for each of them. In addition to the demographic statistics, there were statistics of post-mortem diagnoses for the years under review, which makes it possible to identify disease outbreaks for each year.