Diaconescu, Marius (szerk.): Nobilimea romanească din Transilvania (Satu Mare, 1997)
Livia Ardelean: Procesul de investigare nobiliară a familiei Vlad de Apşa din Maramureş de la sfârşitul secolului XVIII
tendencies of the court from Vienna to restrict the nobiliary rights that thousands and thousands men from Maramuresh asserted they had received them from the Hungarian kings and from the Transylvanian princes and, also, to put these noblemen in the tax payers category. The Romanian small noblemen from Maramuresh opposed to this tendency by starting in the second half of the XVIIIth century ( 1752) a lot of trials, in order to investigate and to official writing them among those with given nobility from the Hungarian legitimate king. Vlad de Apsa family was ennobled by King Sigismund, on the 4th of December 1406, by giving the letter of donation for loan, Vlad's son, for Vannea, Vanconis's son and for Vancea, Slav's son. In the nobiliary inquiry trial, opened on the 14th of January 1799 and finished on the 9th of March 1802, Vlad family used some written documents; as follow: King Sigismund's letter of donation, the letter of possession given by Conventus from Lelesz (the 25th of May 1407), letters of testimony, of agreement, of land division, extracts from different writings of the noblemen from Maramuresh, various inquiries for other related families. At the same time several noble witnesses were interrogated, especially the land neighbours of the different members of the family. According to their own statements Vlad family is pauperized having small areas in Apşa de Mijloc, Apşa de Jos, Apşa de Sus and Biserica Albă (nowadays this territory belongs to Ukraina).These witnesses underlined the fact that Vlad family belongs to families with given nobility.This family's properties were handed down to masculine inheritors, the last-bom boy of the family lived on the ancestors' place named Vladeska or Vladiana. The family's members (as we find out from documents) did not hold an important situation in the county at the end of the XVIIIth century, only some members of the family knew to read, they were:a certain lieutenant Petru Vlad from Apşa de Jos, a tax collector Toader Vlad from the same Apşa, a juryman of the county Alexa Vlad, an orthodox priest in Apşa de Jos, Toader Vlad, a vicar in Apşa de Mijloc, named Michael Vlad. Simultaneous with this trial other collateral inquiries were made for the family's relatives: Opriş, Marina, Mihály, Simon, Ivanciuc, Hozen etc. The trial ended with the recognition of the family's nobility and also with the exemption from the established taxation due to the pauperization. 244
