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The present article aims to disseminate the written texts of the first oaths taken in Romanian in the Transylvania. The sworn declarations required by officials over the Middle Ages and the pre-modern period are analysed from a historical perspective. Emphasis is placed on oaths taken by interviewed persons and witnesses. Also, starting from the idea that the oaths were sworn into the spoken language and with similar contents in the three languages of the province, two cases of oaths taken in German, Hungarian and Romanian are now presented to the wider public, all preserved in Sibiu’s town archives. The texts differ according to the religion of the witness. Other written oaths form the Chioar area and from the Transylvanian plain are published now, concluding that a standard form was used stereotypically for the spoken languages. The Romanian language, in which these oaths were written, has been strongly influenced by Hungarian and German, with archaisms and regionalisms. These particularities suggest a certain inhomogeneity and difficulty in putting the spoken words in writing by the scribe. An attempt was also made to establish the name of the author(s) of these documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reconstitution of the demographic evolution of the Jewish population in Satu Mare county’s rural communities requires research into the censuses organized by the Hungarian authorities in the second half of the 19th century, as well as into the confessional registers of civil status. These two sources should be used carefully because they are, they have a number of shortcomings that can influence demographic analysis. Regarding the situation of the Jewish registers in Satu Mare county, it should be noted that these are kept for a few localities, in a very small number, only in the form of sheets containing information for a short period of time. Among the localities for which parts of the parish registers still remain were selected Ciumesti, Beer, Vezendium, Portita, Tiream, Petresti and Dindesti. We stopped on them because the documents related to these villages include information for several years (10) and are completed with the date of birth, the child’s first and last names, the father’s first and last names, the mother’s first name and the place of residence. The Jewish communities in rural areas developed in the same way as in other regions of Hungary. They increasingly adopted Hungarian names, using Hungarian language to draw up acts related to religious life, but also those relating to civil status. At the end of the 19th century, in some Jewish communities in Satu Mare on the second Saturday the religious service was kept in Hungarian language. To encourage this, local authorities have given them financial support as well as other official religious communities. By accepting all these compromises, they won, receiving recognition and economic opportunities. But even if the Jews declared themselves Hungarians, religious differences remained as an ethnic stigma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the communist regime, the evidence related to education in Hungarian mother tongue was under restricted access, except for two statistical yearbooks in which only limited data was available. At present, 28 years after the fall of the Romanian communist regime, public access to archived records is considerably easier. However, for the period 1948-1989, a statistical report on education in the Hungarian language hasn't been done so far. Given the lack of descriptive data, our inquiry has sought to portray a history of Hungarian mother tongue school education in Romania in the communist era as it has been revealed following our enterprise of collecting, selecting, sorting and analyzing data from relevant statistical yearbooks, statistical reports on education and the other published or unpublished statistical records. After the reconstruction of a satisfactory set of documents containing data on the number of schools, number of enrolled pupils and number of teaching staff, our research was focused on a trend analysis. Finally, contrasting these findings with the legislative and political context, we tried to provide some answers on how and why the communist regime had limited the mother tongue education opportunities of the Hungarian population in Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the last historical reconstitution published in 1997, and a quasi confirmation of it, in 2006, by the presidential condemnation of the communist regime, the research of Hungarian minority education in Romania, during the communist era, seemed to be arrived at a dead point. However, due to the various divergent historiographical approaches and to the political use of them, the topic tends to be a never-ending story of the local multiculturalism issue. After the downfall of the communist regime, mother-tongue-based education became a central element of the political struggle for minority rights. Due to a serious lack of data, most of descriptions were based on the effects of the educational regulations and political events on minority education. In this context, the educational evidence was interpreted mostly in a dialectical key: majorityminority, Romanian-Hungarian, official-samizdat, censored-uncensored, counted-estimated. This ended in divergent opinions reflected in the field literature, social policy debates and in the common sense fallacy of majority-minority representation. Collecting as much structural data as possible and avoiding the pitfalls of existing data sources, our study redraw the trend line of Hungarian language school education in Romania between 1948-1989 and seeks to depict its meaning trough the light of past educational policies, political events, the national trend line, and the demographical evolutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the first monuments of the Romanian language had been recorded in the second half of the 18th century, simultaneously with the drawing up of the Hungarian-Romanian bilingual real estate registers known as "Urbarium" In Maramureş, they appeared in the eighteen eighties, being considered the first documents of this sort. They had been commissioned by the Vienna Court that intended to regulate the property relationships and even impose that the nobility pay taxis to the treasury. One of these regulations from Maramures county referred to Botiza village, on the Iza river, that was one of the typical bondsmen villages in Maramureş, where there were two important landowners in the 18th century, the situation of this village resembling the other bondsmen villages from Ardeal. The present paper presents some of the bondsmen's obligations, as they result from these documents but also a vision of the Romanian language already structured at that moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study represents a short presentation of the involvement of the ethnic community of gypsies in the economic and commercial life of Transylvania in the centuries 15-16. They had a special situation within this space being considered free people who had the right to move here and there paying only a tax to the state. However slavery is attested although restrained as a phenomenon; gypsies were in the possession of monasteries or noblemen or in the Transylvanian feuds of the Romanian rulers where they had various activities. The Hungarian documents mention them under the name of cygány and the German documents call them zigeuner, attesting groups of gypsies ruled by names such as: senior Emaus, Toma the Bulgarian/the Polgar, the rulers Florian and Benedict etc. The gypsies from Transylvania were involved in various economic activities like: raising animals, especially horses so necessary for their journeys, working on the fields, manufacturing the iron and the wood and they got orders to repair or produce equipment necessary for the army;we can find them involved in producing goods for the market but also seeking for gold in the rivers or as salt manufacturers. Due to their musical sense they got involved in the noblemen's entertainment. We can find them as infantrymen in the army and in the law system we can find them as executors. The present study pursued to accomplish an excursion in the economic activities carried by the ethnic community of the gypsies, fact that attests both their presence and their value on the Transylvanian territory in the 15th and 16th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of the family Simon of Caransebeş we plan to write on within this article from a genealogic point of view, presents an interesting variant of the Banat social elites picture. The article is meant to round the image of the Romanian social elites within the Principality of Transylvania era, an ever more abundant one in the historical literature the last years. There was a series of difficulties to reconstitute that family history on a genealogic basis -similarly to other cases we have studied -, as a result of the reference material unsubstantiality and inconsistency. Under such a perspective and within the radius of information we possess now we have tried to reconstitute the profile of each of the family's members as fitted in his generation. An unequal construction was drawn up, strictly accorded to what the acts of that time had registered and to what the passed time preserved. The genealogic image corresponds to that of a noble family from the 16th-17th centuries Caransebeş, a Romanian family in our opinion, on the ground of a majority Romanian milieu the family lived in, of their matrimonial alliances exclusively concluded with other Romanian noble families from the Banat or Haţeg, or the fact that the family onomatology, with a certain conservative line by an obstinate reiteration of some Christian names, does not show any proclivity to Magyar language even if the Romanian elites in the Banat passed the anterior centuries from Orthodoxy to Catholicism. As a result of the reference data we have gone over, we have the profile of a well knocked together family, with obvious relations and affinities, with an evolutionary development of two centuries within which the family's members concerned themselves both with the family advancement and the community they lived in serving up. The family was also an exponent of the "new" nobility of position which had proliferated in the eastern Banat since the end of the 15th century, a series of its members having repeatedly held for castellan (castellanus), mayor (judex primarius), nobiliary magistrate judge (judex nobilium) or jury man (juratus) in Caransebeş, so to say an almost complete palette of the local dignities. It is an eloquent proof concerning that family active involvement in the social-economic and political-juridical current life of the city, a fact that also pleads for its privileged status, its obvious honor, education, and an intrinsic assumed welfare when holding such dignities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the issue of the Orthodox primary school system in the District of Cetatea de Piatră (Chioar), during the second half of the 19th century. The main subjects of interest are: the presence and the quality of the school houses, the selection process and the choosing of the teachers, the existence and the use of didactic materials (including school books). The conclusions point at the fact that the educational process in the given area and time period had been confronted with endless problems, caused by the government's struggles to impose de extended use of Hungarian language, but also by the Romanian communities' lack of understanding about the importance of the education in the process of maintaining the national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]