Page 138 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Aleksander Panjek and Miha Zobec

that could affect their image in the community, they seem to represent a
good example on which to test both the validity of the assumption that the
quantitative fluctuations of godparenthoods reflect the level of prestige,
as well as the kind of events that managed to positively and negatively
influence the attractiveness of elite godparents in the local peasant society.
For godparenthood to be used as an indicator of prestige in the com-
munity, it is first necessary to take into account the baptisms of Černe
children in which male members of the same family acted as godfathers,
since these numbers would influence the results by increasing the number
of godfathers. The Černe family shows a clear pattern, since until the mid-
eighteenth century they were not once godfathers to sons and daughters of
their closest relatives. The first Černe man acting as godfather at baptism
to a Černe child was recorded only in 1742. We may assume that, until then,
the family’s godparenthood policy privileged its role in building alliances
with other families, rather than consolidating family ties. Consequently,
until the last decades of the eighteenth century, Černe males’ godparent-
hoods to children of other families strongly prevailed over the in-family
ones. The high number of in-family godfathers between 1785 and 1824 re-
flects the period of numerous in-family marriages, aimed at limiting the
fragmentation of the landed property. Later in the nineteenth century, in-
family godparenthoods remain relatively stable, while those outside of the
family tend to decrease, in particular in the second half of the century and
until World War I (figure 4.2). On the whole, the pattern shown by the
Černe family corresponds very well to the European trends (Alfani 2007;
Alfani and Gourdon 2012a; Fertig 2016).
In order to measure the attractiveness of the Černes in the communi-
ty, the remaining out-of-family godparenthoods are set in relation to the
number of baptisms in the village of Tomaj. By considering only the god-
parenthoods to children of other families, we apply a method very sim-
ilar to that used by Alfani and Munno in their case study on Nonantola
in the late sixteenth century, to get ‘an idea of how popular’ a family was
(Alfani and Munno 2012, 105–7). This enables us to calculate the percent-
age of baptisms in which Černe men appear as godfathers. As mentioned
above, baptisms in which Černes figured as godfathers to children of their
own male family members are excluded from the total of baptisms. Bap-
tism records allow a reasonably certain identification of births in the vil-
lages from around 1690 onwards and for this reason our series starts with
this year, which also coincides with the time of the first recorded mayor
from the Černe family. To ensure complete comparability, all figures con-

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