Öt nemzedék: a Mannó család története
Five generations – The History of the Mannó Family

Summary/Abstract: For the nineteenth-century, the sources for this study are the documents in the family archives, while their twentieth-century history is reconstructed on the basis of the recollections of family members. Demeter Mannó, the family founder, was a Greek Orthodox merchant who moved to Pest from Vienna. Here, he relinquished his trade and also instructed his sons’ guardians to encourage their training for administrative careers. Both sons graduated in law: the older son, who died at an early age, became a clerk, but István, the younger one, grew up to be a successful merchant and an eminent public figure. István married his daughters to educated, liberal burghers. Szilárd, István’s less gifted son, received land and married a woman from a noble family. Szilárd’s children, the fourth generation, married into the landed nobility and did not continue their grandfather’s work to increase the family’s estates. Although the two sons graduated from university, they chose to live on their land and did not see mush use of their education. Their lives and social position were entirely based on the revenues from their inherited wealth. Despite their fundamentally gentry lifestyle, their education and distance from public life separated them from the rest of the gentry community. Following the Second World War the family members became impoverished. For the fifth generation, the sons growing up after the war, university education was not merely the done thing for an aristocratic family, but an investment to build their future on. Although their childhood and upbringing was similar to previous generations, their mentality was markedly different even before the war. The fortunes of the family were finally on the rise again due to the educated members of the sixth and seventh generation.

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