1/169/0/1/1745

Six pages of a statistical table of villages, kept in the Central Archives of Historical Records (Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych) in Warsaw among the files of the South Prussian department of the Prussian General Directory. The archive calls the volume “Die neuesten topografischen Nachrichten von Südpreussen” (the latest topographical reports of South Prussia) and dates it 1797. The six pages are numbered 401 to 406 in pencil. They hold part of an alphabetical list of the villages of one district, with the houses, churches and inhabitants of each, and are published as one document, a table.

Historical background

Prussia formed the province of South Prussia from the Polish lands it took in the partitions of 1793 and 1795. The province was governed from Berlin by a department of the General Directory, the central authority for finance, war and the royal domains, and in the province itself by war and domain chambers at Poznań, Kalisz and Warsaw. The territory of each chamber was divided into districts, each under a district councillor (Landrat); Konin was one of the eleven districts of the Kalisz chamber. The files of the Berlin department, which are the fonds this volume belongs to, include returns that the new administration collected on the places of the province.

In 1796 the King gave the confiscated estate of Trąbczyn to Prince Friedrich Ludwig of Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen (1746-1818). The table counts the estate’s villages as the Prussian administration found them in the first years of his ownership.

Contents

The list. The entries are numbered and run in alphabetical order; these pages have numbers 140 to 303, from Kurow to Wierzbna [1]. The places named, among them Ląd with its monastery, Lądek, Rzgow and Stare miasto, lie around Konin. The pages do not name the district and carry no date [1].

What is counted. Each entry gives the kind of place and its name, the number of houses and the number of churches, then the Christians and the Jews, each as male, female and their sum, and last the sum of all persons [1]. Most places are villages (Dorf). The others are Hollander settlements (“Haul.”, for Hauland), mills, demesne farms (“Vorw.”, for Vorwerk), the monastery of Ląd and one inn (Krug) [1]. A place with no church or no Jews has a dash in that column. Jews are entered for eight places, never more than four persons in one [1].

The page totals. Each page ends with a line headed “Latus”, the total of that page in every column, numbered 6 to 11 [1]. Five pages of the list therefore stood before these, and the alphabet shows that at least one followed, with the names in Z.

Trąbczyn and the places near it. Trąbczyn, written “Trąpczyn”, is entry 291: 32 houses, 1 church and 165 inhabitants, 51 male and 114 female [1]. Its Hollander settlement is entry 292, larger than the village: 34 houses and 271 inhabitants [1]. Two small places carry the estate’s name in shortened form: a Nowa wieś with 5 houses and 49 inhabitants (entry 194) and a Stara Huta with 2 houses and 9 inhabitants (entry 283) [1]. Szetlew has 11 houses and 84 inhabitants; Szetlewek has 20 houses and 140 inhabitants, 4 of them Jews [1]. Łukom, the neighbour with which Trąbczyn disputed its boundary for two centuries, has 28 houses and 149 inhabitants, and its Hollander settlement 8 houses and 40 inhabitants [1].

Form and language

The heading of the table is printed, in German. It stands on a taller leaf that lies behind the written leaves and shows above each of them, so that one heading serves every page. The entries are in one clerk’s hand. He wrote the kinds of place in German script and the names in Latin script. The names are Polish, in his spelling, and a number of them are shortened (“Kurow Grab:”, “dito Szyman.”). In every line the men and women add up to the sum given, and the lines of each page add up to its total.

Related holdings

The grant of Trąbczyn to Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen in 1796: Oe 1 Bü 14525 and I. HA GR, Rep. 7 C, Nr. 3570. The parcelling of Zagórów and Trąbczyn among settlers in 1805 and 1806: 53/968/0/-/801. The boundary between Trąbczyn and Łukom, as the commission of 1775 and the Crown Tribunal in 1782 fixed it: 53/17/0/-/Konin Gr.145 and 53/17/0/-/Konin Gr.153. The letters of the Prince’s agent Triebenfeld on the management of the estates: Oe 1 Bü 9454.

Scans

The editor supplied three images from the volume. Each shows two facing pages of the table; they were cut at the fold into six page images. The printed heading, which stands on a leaf behind the written ones, is at the top of each image.

Transcription

There was no earlier transcription. An AI model (Claude) read the table from the scans, line by line, and the editor then checked that reading against the scans, line by line, on a sheet that shows each line of the table beside a picture of the same line; 25 names were corrected. The table is given as a table: one row for each line of the page, in the page’s own columns. The printed heading is given once, above the first page.

The kind of place and the name stand in one column on the page and in one cell here. The stop that the clerk set after every figure is left out, and his dash in an empty column is kept. Where he shortened a name he ended it with a tailed stroke, often followed by a colon; the stroke is given as a period, or as the colon where he set one. The names are spelt as on the page, with the marks the clerk set on the letters and no others.

Checking the figures

Every line of the table carries its own sums, and every page its total. As read, the men and women of each line add up to the sum beside them, the Christians and Jews to the total of the line, and the lines of each page to the page’s total in all nine columns. A misread figure would break one of these sums; none is broken. The names have no such check and rest on the two readings.

Summary and translation

The summary was written in German from the table and translated into English; each statement in it was then checked against the table. The English version of the table translates the heading and the kinds of place and leaves the names as the clerk wrote them, except that Trąbczyn and Świątniki take the spelling this edition uses everywhere.