Dobrescu, Adela (szerk.): Samcult. Revistă de cultură şi civilizaţie (Satu Mare - Mátészalka, 2010)
Dr. Paula Cătălina Virag: The family of the romanian village int he country of Satu Mare during the end of 19th-the 20th centuries
and L. Henry on the registers of the parishes of Corund, Racova, Craidorolţ and Apa for the period between 1867-1914. We identified several behaviors that fit the population of these villages among other Romanian villages in the area or in other far ethnic-demographic regions. We used the information from the parish of Călineşti, Vama, Moişeni and Racşa in order to illustrate the issue of concubinage and illegitimate children, because the region of Tara Oaşului registered a great number of persons engaged in a relationship without the blessing of the church. The number of marriages increased on the background of social-economic changes. The number of those willing to found a family increased when the economy was running favorable for a good living standard. The opposite of this situation happened when the economy was low and few people were interested to engage in a marriage. The distribution of marriages on decades (decades with higher or lower frequency of marriages), of birth or death rate could be related with several aspects of high or low economy, high or low level of life, with periods of crisis or epidemics. The frequency of marriages in a year varied according to seasons (they were frequent in autumn and winter when people weren’t obliged with field work) and to the fasts over the year. The most frequent were the protogam marriages, namely marriages between young people who had never been married. The average age of men at their first marriage was 24-25 years because of the Austrian military provisions of 1858. The average age of women to marry was 19-20 years. A normal course of family life mostly depended on the reasons the marriage took place. The differences between the wishes of the individuals and the family’s or the community’s generated conflicts and led in many cases to the end of marriage. The church and the civil power have agreed upon the divorce, but with reluctance, which is illustrated by the difficult conditions that settled the permanent separation. The marriage of two young people was important to their family, not only from the economic point of view. Thus, the partner wasn’t only the choice of the fami ly to be, because they were considered too young to take important decisions for themselves. Parents had the final opinion on finding a girl or a boy for their son or daughter. Children were educated to accept obediently the partners chosen by their parents (there were many cases when the girl run away from home in order to marry the boy she loved, but not embraced by their parents). Parenting is an issue directly related to marriage, and it’s quite complex, since godparents played an important role in the life of the couple regardless if they were of Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic or of Calvinist confession. Tradition said they were the spiritual parents of the young couples and they assumed a certain responsibility towards them. In case there were problems within the new couple, the godparents and the priest were responsible to interfere and to find the best solution for the problems. The groom’s godfather was sacred (the one who baptized the groom) because he is the spiritual parent, a status even more important than that of the natural parent. He was never changed because he knew all the habits of the entire family. If the godfather was old, he should designate his children to follow him. If they refused, the couple could make their own choice for their godparents. Remarriage was allowed by the Greek Catholic church and was tolerated as a human weakness. First, remarriages of widows and divorced persons were accepted as long as they were not guilty of marriage dissolution. The most common remarriages happened between widowers and young unmarried women, and the age differences could be very big. In the case of remarriage, the community has privileged the widower, unlike the widow, with the possibility of a new marriage even if the mourning period wasn’t over. There were cases when the husband calls exemption from mourning in order to contract a new marriage in less than a month after his wife’s death. All the exemptions from mourning have the man as initiator to this, because the woman was not allowed to break the period of mourning. The arguments to support these applications would plead for the difficulty in nursing little children, in house holding, activities that would more likely match the profile of a woman, rather that a man. Exogamy was mostly influenced by the increasing and decreasing of the local population, and by the overall number of population etc. Men had more freedom to move in the geographic area, unlike women, who had less chance to engage in a marriage in another vi llage. Most brides and grooms who moved into one village, had come from rather small distances, only few were from other counties. There were cases when some grooms originated from the far territories of Hungary (Mişcolţ), but 54
