„Én is anyja lévén leányomnak”. Gondoskodás a mostohagyermekről a 17. századi győri családokban – a végrendeletek tükrében
“Being Also a Mother to My Daughter.” Taking Care of Stepchildren in Seventeenth-Century Families in Győr – According to Last Wills

Summary/Abstract: Of the 880 wills which survived from seventeenth-century Győr, 55 were drafted by men who made references to a second marriage and 77 were drafted by widowed women who had remarried. Thus, there were potentially at least 132 families in the city in which children from different marriages may have lived together. 50 testament-makers noted that their children came from various marriages, and 41 mention their stepchildren. This corpus is analyzed in this study. In the wills that survived from Győr, the testament-maker usually mentions his or her stepchildren who lived in the same household, almost always mentioning at least their given names. They were rarely specified as heirs (usually only if the testament-makers did not have children of their own), but the shares bequeathed to them were usually of a larger value than those given to distant relations. There are very few cases when a stepchild received no share of an estate or inheritance, but there were also a few cases in which testament-makers treated stepchildren as equal to their own children.

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