The Families of the Inhabitants of Davydivka Village, Pyriatyn Protopopia (according to the Confession List of 1765)

The article is devoted to the problem of demographic development of the Cossack Hetmanate state at the end of the early modern time, in particular, to the local history of the family of the that time in the traditional society. The family and network of family ties of the inhabitants of Davydivka village (Yablunivska sotnia) of Lubny regiment – one of the typical Ukrainian villages of the Hetmanate state in the second half of the 18th century is in the focus of our research attention. The indicators of the general and average size of the households and quantity of the families, generational composition, typology, and structure of the family formations of different groups of rural society in Davydivka village, namely clergy, Cossacks, and peasants are analyzed based on the credential data of the confessional list of 1765. The research relies upon the most commonly used classification of family households in modern historical demography, developed by British historian Peter Laslett. It is established that simple nuclear families were considerably inferior to the numerous complex forms of family organization in Davydivka village in 1765. The results of the research confirm the opinion of most contemporary social historians that the characteristic feature of the Ukrainian family in the second half of the 18th century was the joint residence with a married couple (husband, wife, children) of large number of other close or distant relatives (parents, married children, grandchildren, cousins, nephews, sons-in-law, and daughters-in-law), or even completely unrelated persons. The main thing was not the degree of blood-related ties between the inhabitants of the yard, but the possibility of joint economic activity. Therefore, not only the internal structure of the family but also the idea of the family in the agrarian society sharply differed from that of modern times.