General visitation in 1782–1783 and parishes’ descriptions from 1784 as sources to research settlement within the territory of the Braslaw deanery of the Vilnius diocese

The provisions of the Council of Trident ordered dioceses and parishes administrators regular monitoring of pastoral matters within the territories subordinated to them. Among other things, pastoral visits in parishes and parish visitations in dioceses were to serve this purpose. Under favorable circumstances, parish visitations were an effective tool of diocese administration. They provided a wide perspective on religious, social and economic life in individual parishes. Within the territory of the Vilnius parish the visitations were developed in the 1780s by the bishop Ignacy Massalski, and provided substantial and detailed information on the parish’s life. Moreover, in the middle of the 1780s, the action to collect topographic descriptions of parishes in the Crown and Grand Duchy of Lithuania was carried out. The collected information was to serve the preparation of detailed maps of individual dioceses. The article is an attempt at comparing both sources concerning the selected deanery with regard to one criterion – the picture of settlement presented therein. The detailed analysis proves that even in the sources produced by the same persons and at a relatively short time interval, there are significant discrepancies which cannot be persuasively justified