1850. ÉVI ERDÉLYI NÉPSZÁMLÁLÁS (1994)

HELYNÉVMUTATÓ

The order did not mention the census of animals though in two rubrics of the original sheet the number of horses and the number of cattle are always indicated. Since data with regard to the animal stock are rather scarce it seemed to be useful to publish these figures loosely related to this population census. The steps of the conducting of the population census will not be followed here since to search for and process to original data would represent a separate task. Since the instruction was rather unequivocal major problems could have hardly appeared. Differences with regard to assignments may be expected mostly with regard to establishing social belonging. Here, partly the practice formed at former surveys was helpful but the work was rendered easier also by the simplicity of the stratification since the majority of the population were engaged in agricultural production. The conspicuously separate strate of land-owners, priests and even teachers living in the villages could have hardly caused significant differences and it was only in the towns that a greater number of categories less liable to separation and merged together to a greater extent, could be found. All this however would have caused difficulties only if the originalfamily sheets had remained since the respective data were not included into the summaries. More concerns in the smooth conducting of the population census might have been caused by the resistance of the population which was often referred to at the evaluation on the data. It is beyond doubt that the apathy having followed the suppression of the war of liberation and the passive resistance which ensued made the work of the surveyers difficult but the resistance should not be overrated. The bias due to that is hardly over that in the first population census. The possibility of bias due to the partiality of the executive organization but this can be manifest only with regard to data of nationality group-belonging since the rest of the date were, in the final analysis, indifferent and no one was interested in falsifying them. However with regard to the data of nationality group belonging it can be justifiably presumed that - first of all when establishing the number of Hungarians - efforts were made to reduce the respective figures. This was possible, primarily in the cases of the mechanical registration of the nationality group belonging of those wavering among the urban population who already existed at that time and, respectively, of the rural population whose mother tongue was Hungarian but whose religion was either Greek Catholic or Greek Orthodox. This practice can be observed with describing statisticians and primarily also with Elek Fenyes: they determined the size of the nationalitygroups primarily on the basis of the division of the population by religions, equating automatically the number of Roumanians or Ruthenians with that of the followers of the above mentioned religions in spite of the mother tongue of a part of these people having been already Hungarian by the middle of the nineteenth century.® (This regards primarily of those localities with a Hungarian majority where these people who moved in by small groups as farm-hands of well-to-do peasants.) In our case this factor caused minor biases, to the detriment of the Hungarian population, mainly in the special Szekely administrative areas but it is also possible that persons of the Lutheran confession whose mother tongue was Hungarian were taken into account as Saxons. Dividing the Roman Catholic population in this manner was not possible since in the area of Transylvania their overwhelming majority were regarded as Hungarians in the same way as the almost homogeneous blocks of the Calvinists and, respectively, of the Unitarians. The extent of the data bias will be analyzed later in connection with the evaluation of the nationality group figures. Here, on the basis of the indications which appeared in the special leteratue, we only hint at the possibility of the data being intentionally biased but had no concrete evidence to substantiate these hints. Though the atmosphere supposed to have prevailed gives ground for such presumptions but when searching fot the sources of errors in the 1850 population census, causes - which had existed in the case of the Josephian data collections and would also arise in the case of the first population censu-ia conducted by the official statistical organization, and especially of that of 1869 - are much more probable. The instruction, rather inaccurate compared to those in the case of subsequent censuses, the lack of clear concepts, the gaps in the conducting organization, the lack of experience of the enumerators, the numerical errors of the data processing and, most of all, the enumeration having been dragging on for a long time, equally represented smaller or greater sources of errors. At the time of the population census the enumeration of the military population represented a specific problem. Though Paragraph 5 of the instruction stipulated that those in active service are exempted from the declarations, in 1850 the First and Second Frontier Guard Regiments still existed and their civil and military populations were equally taken into the census. (The former consisted of localities of the counties of Hunyad and Fogaras while the latter was made up of three sub-areas around Naszod.) On the other hand, the localities of the two Szekely infantry regiments and of the Szekely cavalry regiment already figured only with the civil population, together with the rest of the localities in the districts, until finally, in 1851, the Transylvanian Military Frontier Zone was comletely abolished. Summing up the above, it is probable that that the conducting of the 1850 population census was not smooth and its results should not be expected to be perfect. The published data will also contribute to its eveluation 189.