The earliest information about the Balakhna uyezd dates to the 1530s-1540s. During the second half of 16th and in the 17th century, the process of forming the Balakhna uyezd was quite intense: Zauzolskaya, Strelitzkaya, Gorodetskaya, Puretskaya, Zharskaya, Tolokontsevskaya, Vezlomskaya and other volosts were incorporated into the uyezd. The boundaries of volosts were shifting and changing throughout this whole period. Cadastral descriptions of the Balakhna uyezd territory are fragmentary. For example, there are no descriptions of the 16th-century town of Balakhna, however, the town was described six times during the 17th century, which makes it possible to use the available cadaster materials for the reconstruction of socio-economic development of the town. The descriptions of Zauzolskaya volost allow us to present the most complete picture: there are five descriptions dating to the 16th and mid-17th centuries at the disposal of the researchers. The processes of economic and socio-demographic development of Kozinskaya volost can be studied in detail thanks to the copies and lists of cadaster materials of the monastery's individual landholdings found in the archive of the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. Zharskaya volost, unlike Strelitzkaya, Gorodetskaya and Zauzolskaya volosts, has the most complete set of surviving descriptions dating to the 17th century. Gorodetskaya volost was in the possession of various secular feudal lords, so some descriptions of their holdings have been preserved. Thus, it is difficult to reconstruct a complete picture of the formation of the administrative-territorial division, of the territory’s economic and socio-demographic development because documents are scattered in different archives, and there are no complete descriptions of the Balakhna uyezd.
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