Everyday Life of Starshyna’s Family in the 18th Century: Dowry Registers for Girls from the Skorups Family
Abstract
The purpose of the research paper is to analyze several surviving dowry registers of women from the Skorups family over a thirty years period in the 18th century, to uncover about the everyday life of that Cossack-starshyna (Cossack officers) family, influential in Starodub region and the Cossack Hetmanate.
The scientific novelty. Among the few documents that serve well for everyday life study, the dowry registers for women from starshyna families are worth analyzing. They are scattered in various archival funds, sometimes published in well-known collections of documents from the family archives of the Cossack Hetmanate starshyna. They always catch the eye of the scholar, who is immediately trying to process them to study very different aspects of the Cossack state’s life. However, a thorough study of this type of document, compiling lists of surviving registers, remains a matter of the future. Therefore, the analysis of several such registers from the same family of starshyna seems important, because it is conducted for the first time and determines the scientific novelty of the study.
Conclusions. During the 18th century, thanks to the efforts of representatives of three generations of the Skorups, an influential and wealthy family emerged, which any representative of the Cossack Hetmanate elite wanted to marry. The standard of life of a starshyna family should not only correspond to a high status but also highlight and elevate it in every possible way. Dowry registers for the representatives of Cossack-starshyna families are an important source of information about the everyday life and that-time living standards of the elite.
According to the analyzed documents, the everyday life of the Skorups family corresponded to a very high social status in the hierarchy of the Cossack Hetmanate elite. Items from the considered registers cannot show the durability of the family tradition, its history, and special individualization objectively due to the nature of the sources. Lists of items show a desire to follow fashion trends and achieve higher and higher status no longer in the Cossack but in the imperial hierarchy. Women’s dowry registers of other Cossack-starshyna families should become the subject of research in the future because they are very informative for the study of everyday history.
Funding. The publication is prepared with the support of the Institute of History, Polish Academy of Sciences and King’s College London.
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