Bulgarian Family in South Bessarabia During the First Half of XIX Century in Scientific Field of Social History

Abstract

Family is a fundamentally social institution that plays an important role in the historic and ethnic development of any nation. There have been mechanisms for the transfer of plenty of elements exactly within the family for ages. There they appear and are formed, take root and change their forms, meaning, and content with time. They eventually smooth out and disappear. The situation concerns both social roles and their age and gender clarity that connects the family with bigger and more complicated forms of human integration, such as community and society which are dynamically interlinked. A research subject is a family in a Bulgarian diaspora group defined as an object of social history. The subject of study is the evolution of forms, structure, and Bulgarian family’s everyday elements in South Bessarabia, moreover, it’s about intergenerational interaction and family relations. The subject of social history is complicated for most researchers who have taken on this distinctive activity. Associating himself with the statements about the faintest subject of social history, R.Zider gave the most “ technical” version of the definition:” Social history is the history of society, the overall relationship between people”. R.Zider considered a family as a complex system that “summarizes the influence of society’s macro system and tasks to reproduce workforce and society’s structure; to create gender’s behavioral stereotypes, norms and relations between parents and children together with adults and old people; to regulate sexual behavior in pre-marital and marital periods”. At the family level this researcher addressed the issue of interrelationships between social, economic and political aspects. After the Bulgarians’ mass resettlement to South Bessarabia at the beginning of the XIX century, the foundation of Bulgarian families was a nuclear family, in other words, a family that consisted of a married couple with or without children. But speaking about a nuclear family, the fact it’s the strongest and the longest one among small groups that can be connected with bigger family or clan formations should be kept in mind. So such a family should be different from just small families that are self-sufficient and disconnected with great patrimony groups. In societies with a strong system of kinship, a nuclear family doesn’t appear as an isolated and defined unit. Under the effect of modernization processes large systems of kinship smooth out, a nuclear family separates from big disintegrating patrimony groups and takes features of a small family. The author makes a conclusion about the studied social system of Bulgarian family in South Bessarabia during the first half of XIX century and based on a great number of demographic ready-made indicators states that during two first decades the population kept social and behavioral models peculiar to Bulgaria in XlX century. But they were gradually getting closer to the demographic model of the European part of the Russian empire. As a result, in the middle of the century own demographic behavior was creating which united both models. Keywords: Bulgarian family, Bessarabian Bulgarians, social history, multidisciplinary approach, demographic indicators, a nuclear family.