Are there any data or have any studies been done on typical distances that individuals or families would travel in permanently moving from one town to another?  Reasons for such relocation could be seeking a spouse or better work opportunies or avoiding the draft.  Would people in the north Pale in the late 1800s tend to stay relatively close to their towns of origin, or stay within a uyezd (district) , or even a gubernia (province)?

Steve Diamond
New York City
diamondesllc@...

Not familiar with any studies, but here are some numbers from my family in what is now Belarus:
   Karelichy to Lubcha  26.4 km
   Karelichy to Kapyl  93.5 km
   Turec to Kapyl   80.5 km

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Steven Usdansky
usdanskys@...
USDANSKY (Узданский): Turec, Kapyl, Klyetsk, Nyasvizh, Slutsk, Grosovo
SINIENSKI: Karelichy, Lyubcha, Navahrudak
NAMENWIRTH: Bobowa, Rzepiennik
SIGLER: "Minsk"

I do not know about studies, but I do know that when Novorossiya, the area north of the Black Sea (now in Ukraine) was added to the Pale, many Jews from the northern Pale resettled there. So that would have been way out of their Gubernia.

Susan Slusky
Highland Park, NJ

All my eight great grandparents came from the Suwalki-Lomza Gubernias in NE Poland to the UK between 1865 and 1875. They all lived within about 20 or so miles of each other, some a lot closer.   They all lived on the borders with the Konigsberg area of East Prussia, the Kovno area of Lithuania and the Grodno area of what is now Belarus. 

However, in the early 20th century some were forcibly moved south to Ukraine or east to Russia e.g. in WW1. Some cousins of  one of my great grandparents who lived in a town in Suwalki (that went into Lithuania in 1919), were born in the North but the two youngest children were born in Odessa before they came to NE England in early 20th century. They could have been forcibly moved but as their rather was a Rabbi, it may have been voluntary, and for job reasons.  

Jill Whitehead. Surrey, UK

My surname (originally Kherson) suggests a patronymic from the city or province north of the Black Sea. Yet, my earliest known ancestor on the line, Shmuel HaCohen Kherson bca 1875, raised his family (from about 1890-1938) in a village a few miles south of Vilna (Dieveniskes). I have found nothing connecting Shmuel with the geographical Kherson, despite intensive searching on all cylinders. He is mentioned numerous times in the Divenishok Memorial Book, but there are no references to his having come from Kherson, yet by the same token, there are no references to his having ancestry in the town of Divenishok either. Meanwhile, on FTDNA I discovered a mild autosomal match (79.4 cM ttl, 10.6 cM lrgst) to a Cherson family (originally Khersonsky) with origins in the Tarascha region around Kyiv but the ydna lineages to not match so this cannot be same Kherson patriline. In sum, I cannot be sure whether in my family the surname is a patronymic from the Ukraine (some have suggested a possible acronym such as Chatan-Reb-Solts-of-N(being the first letter of some unknown place), since I believe his father in law was Reb Solts), and if so when it arose (but would have to have been circa 1875 or earlier). I make this post to suggest, as has been detailed in other posts, that there is a migratory route to and from Kherson, Odessa, and perhaps Kyiv, and the Vilna area. My guess is that riverine transport was predominant for long interior distances in the 19th Century, but I am not sure what rivers would have been used to connect these places.
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Adam Cherson

From research into the various branches of my family from Lithuania and Western Belarus - 

1. For persons who reached adulthood in the old country, the grand majority of them married someone within ca. 20-30 miles (30-50 km) of each other, often from neighboring towns. Once married, they would live in one town or the other. It didn't seem to be an issue with the Russian authorities if a person lived in a nearby town to the original one that a person was registered with. For instance, Lak/Lock family members registered in Plunge Lithuania, but living in nearby Telsiai.
2. I have three instances of men who reached adulthood in ca. 1840-1860, who suddenly moved to a town a good 50-60 miles (80-100 km) from their original town of registration. In the new town, these men still maintained their original town of registration; I gather it was difficult to get a new town registration from the Russian officials. I suspect that these sudden moves were related to avoiding army conscription.
3. Starting about 1875, Jews were allowed to reside in Riga and in Tallinn, Estonia, as long as they could get a residency permit from the Russian officials. I had three different Lak families make these moves from northern Lithuania, which I believe were mainly for economic reasons. All their records in these two cities that I have been able to find, state that their town of registration is Plunge, Lithuania. After 10-20 years in these two cities, all these families  immigrated to the US. [An interesting side-note: an immigrant son of the Tallinn Lak/Lock branch always proudly told his family in the US that he was born in the city of Tallinn, which for some reason he thought was in Germany. Even on his US naturalization papers, he declared he was born in Germany. Except thanks to Jewishgen, I found his 1876 birth record from Telsiai, Lithuania. This man's grandson (still living, and a DNA match to me) does not believe this record to be true.]
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Michele Lock

Lak/Lok/Liak/Lock and Kalon/Kolon in Zagare/Joniskis/Gruzdziai, Lithuania
Lak/Lok/Liak/Lock in Plunge/Telsiai in Lithuania
Rabinowitz in Papile, Lithuania and Riga, Latvia
Trisinsky/Trushinsky/Sturisky and Leybman in Dotnuva, Lithuania
Olitsky in Alytus, Suwalki, Poland/Lithuania
Gutman/Goodman in Czestochowa, Poland
Lavine/Lev/Lew in Trenton, New Jersey and Lida/Vilna gub., Belarus

Movement often depended on the actions of the rulers of the pale. I understand that those on the Polish side were forbidden to move very far internally in the pale after the 1863 Polish uprising, when conscription of Jewish boys took place. As my ancestors lived near the Baltic, they got out as soon as they could. An additional spur was famine in the Baltic areas between 1865 and 1875. But up to the time they went to the UK, the families never moved very far. An extra spur later on was improvements in transport - when sail ships gave way to steam ships and with the coming of the railway which opened up new towns and routes, and people could go further afield compared to before. 

Jill Whitehead, Surrey, UK

I did a basic analysis of marriages connected with Salakas in the Zarasai District, Kauanas Guberniya for 1885-1910.  This is at http://zarasai.blogspot.com/2009/08/more-on-marriage.html .  This was based on research funded by Maria Krane.  There are possibly issues with data bias due to source access and survival, but it does seem to be show a reasonably consistent picture,   

Locating to the wife's hometown on marriage due to the custom of kest is discussed at a related post http://zarasai.blogspot.com/2009/07/kest-and-marriage.html

There are also a couple of posts on more general demographic issues - age at death and population size.   Rapid population growth seems to have been endogenous - larger  living families as more people survived into adulthood - and exogenous, due to net positive migration.  It might be possible to use surname studies for individual towns to at least get some rough picture of the latter:  a cursory review of the data suggests more different surnames for Salakas as the 19th century passed. 

I recall hearing about  "whole shtetl" family tree projects some years ago.  If any of these have been materially progressed or completed then better analysis should be available.  Does anyone know of any of these projects?

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Paul Hattori
London UK

SHADUR, SADUR, SHADER, SADER, CHADOUR, SADOUR, SHADOUR,  SZADUR from Salakas, Lithuania
MINDEL, MINDELL from Utena and Vyzuonos, Lithuania
FELLER from Pabrade, Lithuania

Russia had trains by 1850s and the number increased rapidly.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_Russia#:~:text=The%20first%20railway%20line%20was,called%20the%20Tsarskoye%20Selo%20Railway.

There are some well-known Yiddish stories and jokes about Jewish travelers on trains.

Jessica Schein
NYC

I have an interesting situation in my family.  My gf's parents & their then 7 children moved from the Grodno region in Belarus about 1000 miles south to the bottom of Bessarabia near the Black Sea around 1880 as best as I can tell.  The moved from an urban area which was hostile to Jews to a farming area.  They were not farmers but tanners and tradesmen in both places.  I have yet to find a reason for this move.  Their relations that I know about stayed up North at least until the 1890s.

So there must have been many reasons for people to move.

Jessica Schein
NYC

I've heard about Jewish Agricultural Colonies for northern Pale Jews going to the Black Sea area earlier in the 19th, but not as late as 1880: http://chfreedman.blogspot.com/2007/02/jewish-agricultural-colonies-in-ukraine.html Maybe this activity persisted into the 1880s? And possibly some of those who migrated south later returned north (no green thumb: this could be my ggf's story I suppose) and when they did they were known as being from Kherson? BTW Good point about the trains. Now I have to find out whether feasible train lines connecting Odessa with Vilna existed in the 19th Century and when that started being feasible.
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Adam Cherson

Thanks Joel for your work on this fascinating topic. If I am understanding correctly, the areas north of the Black Sea (lands west of the Dnieper River) became part of Czarist Russia only after the break up of the Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth in the late 18th Century, and became known as Novorussiya (New Russia)? Thus, in these former Commonwealth lands all rail lines, including those between Odessa and Vilna would have been built by Czarist Russia? Were Jewish laborers involved in the building of these railroads? Are you aware of any history books in English on the topic of Russian Rairoads in Novorussiya?
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Adam Cherson

My father was born in Tomashpol, Ukraine in 1885 but when he was 3 years old his parents moved 200 kilometers away to Kishinev, Bessarabia, presumably by train, in what is now Moldava. He was saved in the 1903 Kishinev Pogrom because he spent that Pesach with his paternal grandparents in Tomashpol.
Yehuda Berman

I found some info on the Ukrainian lines: "The first railroad in Russian-ruled Ukraine was built in 1865. It ran from Balta to Odesa. In 1868 it was extended to Yelysavethrad and from there through Kremenchuk to Kyiv (1872). By then Kyiv had been connected by rail to Moscow (1869)...In 1870 Kyiv was connected with Odesa through Zhmerynka and with Moscow through Konotop." http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CR%5CA%5CRailroadtransportation.htm
This Libau-Romny line just a few years later was more direct between Vilna and Romny (from Romny to Odessa pehaps involved a stage-coach to Konotop for connection to the above line to Odessa).

Anyhow, it seems that by the mid 1870s it would have been possible to travel by rail more or less directly to and from Vilna and Odessa. The mode of travel used in the earlier 19th Century (when the Jewish Agricultural Colonies first went into effect) may have been overland by horse driven carriage (ouch) and river between Kyiv and Odessa.

I'm sure there is much more to is than the surface I've scratched but at least I have a vague notion that my ggf could have travelled by train as a young man from Kherson to Vilna.

Thanks for the insights.
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Adam Cherson