Corpus of Surnames of the Ilek Cossacks (Based on the 18th–19th Centuries Census Material and Parish Registers)

The article discusses the surnames of the Ilek Cossacks — one of the local communities in the Ural Cossack Host. Nowadays, all the surviving settlements of the Ilek Cossacks are located in the southwest of the Orenburg Region, Russia. This community was shaped as a result of the formation of the Ilek fortress in 1737. Therefore, the “age” of the local group of Cossack surnames is not older than this fortress. For a long time, Ilek Cossacks rarely joined other local groups of the Ural Cossack Host. Cossacks from other stanitsas also rarely moved to the villages on the Ilek. This could have contributed to the emergence of a rather peculiar set of local surnames within the Ural Cossack Host. Until now, the surnames of Ilek Cossacks have not become a specific object of study in onomastics or related disciplines, and this paper aims to bridge this gap. Based on eight archival sources for this group of Cossacks, the author made up a list of just over 600 surnames and their variants with further classification. This list allows to solve problems of theoretical and practical nature: to analyze the evolution of the surnames from census to census and to reveal dialectal features in the surnames; to compare this list to the surnames of other communities of Ural Cossacks and various groups of the Russian people. It also lays the groundwork for a future dictionary of surnames of Ilek Cossacks. The most difficult task is the distinction, in the censuses of 1773 and 1817, between surnames and semi-patronymics formed from the full forms of church names. As a solution, the author proposes a method for determining the status of the second elements of anthroponyms such as Ivan Anufriev, Mikhail Avtonomov, Stepan Vasiliev in the books of these censuses.