Apák és fiúk (Egy Zala megyei naplóíró kisnemesi család két nemzedéke)
Fathers and Sons. Two Generations of a Diary Keeping Lower Noble Family in Zala County

Summary/Abstract: In this article I undertake the parallel analysis of the diaries and contemplations of father and son. The father, Vendel Kovách, a lower noble and county office holder from Galsa in Zala County wrote his diary in 1859–60 under the title Secrets in Zala. The son, Ernő, had started writing his memoirs while in captivity in Arad and decades later he organised them into three bulky volumes. The memoirs of Ernő, who worked after his liberation as a manorial and county engineer before becoming the governor of the Vác prison, end with his release from Arad in 1856. While the simultaneous analysis of the two writings offers several possibilities, I intend to focus on two of these in the present article. Firstly, I examine the personal relationship of father and son, paying special attention to the strategies of the father who was trying ‘to achieve’ his own goals through his son and to the reflections of the son who was reconsid-ering his own achievements in his old age. In the second part of the paper I use a particular example to deal with a question frequently arising when analysing personal sources, namely the issue of relativity. In 1844 Vendel won the rights for supplying the provisions for the county’s soldiers, thus breaking the hegemony of the county’s biggest Jewish pro-duce merchants. Both he (not revealing his role in it) and his son wrote about this story; what is more, it can also be tracked down in the minutes of the county assembly’s meetings since the matter was a county affair. Thus the question of the sources’ particularity multi-plies, with the help of which I hope to provide an insight into the multifaceted nature of opportunities offered by the diary as a source.

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