The article overviews the private sources on the history of Siberian merchantry in the late 18th – the first part of the 19th centuries. It reveals that Siberian merchants were mentioned by other merchants and many people of different classes (bureaucrats, military officers, priests, exiles, commoners) with great deal of difference in various sources such as memoirs, notes and diaries. The author shows the way, in which epistolary legacy is used by modern researchers to illustrate through testimonies the dwellers’ everyday life. The author characterizes the manuscripts of Krasnoyarsk merchant family of Larionov, which include several dozens of documents such as private letters, written by the members of this family, their relatives, friends, and business partners from different Siberian towns. A careful analysis of this correspondence enables to restore value orientations prevailed in the merchants’ environment, to identify changes in the life and outlook of Siberian urban population in the pre-Reform period.