Page 137 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

A Dynasty of Mayors and a Member of Parliament

fathers came from outside the parish, they lived in places within a radius
of about twenty-five kilometres from Tomaj. Most of them were peasants,
butsome werefrom urban centressuchasthe townsofGoricaandTri-
este and its surroundings (from the eighteenth century in particular) or
from the small-town (and industrial centre) Ajdovščina, some of whom
were recorded with the particle ‘sir,’ like Domino Joanne Baptista Bisiach
Vipacensi Chirurgo (from Vipava, 1733). The only godfather coming from
further away was Sir Joanne Wiler from Ljubljana in 1664, but he was a rel-
ative (cognato) of the then parish priest in Tomaj.
In any case, generally speaking, godfathers belonging to the peasant
class and living in the same village as the child’s parents constituted the
prevailing pattern of godparenthood in the Tomaj parish. However, god-
parents from other villages within the parish were very common and even
those coming from slightly more distant places were not rare at all, consid-
ering the aforementioned fluctuations in time. In the first half of the nine-
teenth century, until 1840, the pattern remained relatively unchanged.
Therefore, the number of godfathers living in urban centres, especially the
fast-developing Trieste, remained surprisingly low. Subsequently, the god-
fathers’ place of residence was no longer registered. Yet, at least seventy
percent of godfathers were recorded as ‘peasant’ or with other profession-
al statuses, revealing thus their local provenience.
With reference to the family name, hence at a family level, diverging
trends may be observed, separating the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ry from the nineteenth. In the case of the former period, in some families,
the godfathers almost always carried the same family name as the baptized
children’s fathers; in others the range was limited to a few repeating family
names. Some families mostly had godfathers from the same village, in oth-
ers the choices were less concentrated, not least because they were spread
among several villages within the parish. In contrast, in the nineteenth
century, cases of homonymy between father and godfather are very rare,
although this is only an indirect and somehow vague indicator of family
ties.
Based on the observation that in the Tomaj parish, elite social status was
a factor influencing the choice of godfathers in the early modern period,
as elsewhere in Europe (Alfani and Gourdon 2012b, and that wealth was a
factor of attraction in the nineteenth, we will try and test the assumption
that godparenthood may be used to detect the social prestige of a family in
arural milieu. Having reconstructed the history of the Černe family during
three centuries and having quite precisely identified moments and events

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