Page 121 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

A Dynasty of Mayors and a Member of Parliament

portant to preserve and enrich his landed property and in this sense Ivan
Černe also tells us something about the values in the peasant society of
that time. On the other hand, his losses were not so much the result of
basic business incompetence as of overestimating his ability to cope with
the delay of liquidity requirements on several fronts at the same time, or
that his planned deals simply did not work out. Then again, maybe it was
not so much incompetence as the fact that he relied too much on his good
name and his social status as mayor. When he took off his mayoral clothes,
he became an easy target for creditors. But the total loss of 141 lira, Ivan
Černe’s net deficit, if we exclude his problems with dowries, could not be
fatal, because the amount could not seriously notch the economic basis
of a well-off peasant, which as a member of the mayor’s family in Tomaj
hecertainlywas.The weakest pointisthatwecannotdetermine what the
proportion of lost land was compared to the size of Ivan Černe’s farm. We
simply do not have this information.
In the next (seventh) generation, the Černe family went through a kind
of demographic explosion, making it quite difficult to reconstruct its devel-
opmentandtocorrectlyattributethechildrentotherightfather.Although
in the late 1770s house numbers were introduced in the baptism registries,
cases of homonymy between both husbands and wives, and intertwin-
ing of generations, second marriages, moves between houses in enlarged-
family households (with more house numbers) contribute to make recon-
struction efforts quite puzzling. Nevertheless, we can, with a reasonable
degree of certainty, identify seven Černe fathers within this generation in
Tomaj, who procreated nearly 70 children between 1758 and 1804. Not on-
ly after the mid-eighteenth century were there more married couples in
the family Černe, but they also tended to have more numerous children
compared to the past. A difference may be observed also between the two
family branches that stem from Andrej and Tomaž Černe from the begin-
ning of the eighteenth centuries: while Jožef and Anton, sons of Tomaž,
altogether had only two sons who married (both called Marko), the branch
of Ivan and Jakob, sons of Andrej, produced five male married heirs (Jožef,
Franc, two Jakobs and Jurij; šak, žat, mkk 6 and 7a).
In this period, in 1771, Jožef Černe is mentioned as mayor in Tomaj,
most probably still the one belonging to the previous generation (son of
Tomaž; atta, 195.1,2,13).A fewyears later,in 1779,Jakob Černe, mayor
in Tomaj (mentioned as such also in 1778), was given two small fines for
infringements against the manorial administration, namely for not mow-
ing the count’s hay and having pocketed the compensation without hav-

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