Careers, Conflicts, Everydays. The Life Of A Family From Great-Cumania (1745—1867)

In the 200 year-old Jazygian-Cuman historiography the genealogy is a bit neglected genre. There is only a dozen scholarly studies which demonstrate the history of several generations regarding the 18–19th centuries. There are two characteristics of these studies. On the one hand the authors could not rest on the family archives, on the other hand the families put in centre were non-nobles. We examined a noble family from Túrkeve, whose remains consist of more than 100 documents got into public archives a decade ago. The fortunately survived private letters, debentures, testaments, sales contracts and letters of appointment reveal valuable informations on the interior life of the family. The Felsővályi Vincze family’s relations to leaders of the Great-Cuman settlement and the non-noble majority could be discovered from the ample source-base of the Great-Cuman market-town. We rested on the sources of comitats Heves and Outer-Szolnok to reveal the family roots, of comitats Bihar and Győr for two family members’ geographical mobilization and of archives of the Protestant College of Debrecen to map the institutional education. The facts and relations appeared in documents are completed, varied or sometimes put them in a new light by the remaining objects and information kept by family memory. The thesis deals with the 120 years of the life of four generations of Vinczes from Túrkeve, but the outlined introduction of the 18th century beginnings and of the fifth generation reaches almost two centuries. The thesis was written in chronological order, the analysis of the women’s and men’s careers is interrupted only by the examination of the family’s most important property case. The 60 year-long property case among male and female lines of the family over the lands was broken out by a first generation norm-breaking woman’s testament. We regarded the examination of this testament as important because it was frequently alluded at the proceedings, and later it was used as a model in the female line. The several hundred pages of the property case – completed with the family documents and the administrative papers of the Great-Cuman market-town – cast light on the family’s women’s ambitions and possibilities and beyond that on their daily routine too. Though the contention changed the structure and the existential conditions of the family it could not be held responsible for the men’s retreat from the public life in the beginning of the 19th century. The disappearance of the ’stronger sex’ from the public life of Túrkeve and the Great-Cuman district related to the appearence of the immoderate noble self-consciousness. Neither of the local nor the higher leading class were not pleased at that some members of the third generation – alluding to their noble origin – failed and then refused to pay taxes. Among them was a person who gave up his noble attitude and later became the chief constable of Túrkeve market-town by climbing the rungs of the administrative ladder. All of these proved that the system of norms were not entirely inflexible, the former norm-breakers could become the supervisors of the normative structure. The Felsővályi Vinczes formed an administrative community with the local leading class for generations. Nothing appeared from this in the sphere of their private life, as it becomes evident from the registers of marriages that the family mainly did not establish ties of blood with noble or non-noble ’redemptus’ from Túrkeve or the Jazygian-Cuman District, but with nobles from close or faraway comitats from the beginning of the 18th century until the middle of the 19th century. In the peasants’ environment the Vinczes’ noble scale of values was clearly expressed by the sabotage of tax-paying and their marriage-links as well as the objects of the their furnishing. The greatest social-historical result of this thesis is the demonstration of how the relations changed between a noble family and the non-noble social majority