Population registers and population structure of Zir district in the 19th century

gathering of people creates a population. The subject of the population is human. For this reason, the issue of population and demographic structure has maintain its importance in every period of history. Throughout history, many states have recorded the population, population structure and population characteristics from a different point of view, collected data and published statistics. They fulfilled these processes for some administrative, military, financial and demographic reasons. After the establishment period, the Ottoman State meticulously carried out matters such as the registration (tahrir) of real estate and lands and determining the tax population, especially for military and financial reasons. During the classical period of the Ottoman Empire, censuses were made on household basis, mostly for military and financial reasons. This understanding had continued until the first half of the 19th century, from the 1830s, censuses were carried out for military purposes, in which only the male population was recorded. In these censuses made from time to time, it was only at the end of the 19th century that the whole population could be written together with men and women. The tradition and experience of recording, writing and registering that Ottoman statesmen gained in land registrations manifested itself in the census in the 19th century, too. In the 19th century, the idea of determining the human resource of the Ottoman military organization, which entered a new stage of formation after the abolition of Janissary Corps, and the reform understanding of the period, played a major role in the census. The first census in the Ottoman Empire was conducted in 1830-1831 with the military justification mentioned above. Modern population services in Ottoman Empire started after 1831 census and with the foundation of Census Department (Ceride-i Nufus Nezareti) under the Ministry of Interior and Census State units (Defter Nezareti) in other states as well as Ledger Registers were established in sanjaks. Our study area, Zir District (sub-district in some periods), changes in the administrative status in different periods and, aside from the more westerly direction of the city of Ankara; It is an administrative unit, which includes settlements, some of which are within the districts of Pursaklar, Keçiören, Çankaya, Etimesgut, Sincan, Polatlı, Ayaş, Kahramankazan and whose center is Istanos. The sources of this study, which is about the population registers of the Summit District of Ankara Province in the first half of the 19th century and the evaluation of the data obtained from these registers; These are the population registers of Zir District dated 1252/1836, 1256/1840 and 1258/1842 in the Ottoman Archives of the Presidency of State Archives. In this study, the reading of these population registers, the evaluation of the population data contained here the analysis of the obtained data by converting them into tables and finally the transcription of the entire population registers was made. Thus, an attempt was made to reveal the administrative, social, cultural and demographic structure of a district through an archive book source belonging to the Ottoman period.