The article analyses the 16th-20th century’s Eurasian population studies conducted by European and Russian universities’ demography centers, presented at the international workshop-conference in Yekaterinburg in June 2015. The religious community may be regarded one of the universal social units in the late 19th - early 20th century, both in Russia and European and American countries. While Russia in general lacks primary population census data, its church books that registered births, marriages and deaths with all the supplemented information are the only alternative sources to study its population’s vital events. The uniqueness of these sources is that they existed throughout Eurasia and contained nominative information comparable in character with the basic census data. These ministerial records allow solving a wide range of research tasks in studying socio-cultural changes, family history and local history, as well as conducting comparative studies in collaboration with leading European demographic centers. The most promising method of research is the creation of comparative free access databases, which researchers can analyze using statistical software.