Letters of Tommaso Girolamo Nicolò Battiala (1773 – 1858)

Abstract

All fonds, irrespective of their creator, are an organism in their own right and each one of them has something special and something of its own, specific to a certain region, customs, people, language... However, family and personal fonds represent perhaps the most interesting archival material. They are truly an inexhaustible source of information, from the circumstances in which the family lived (historical, political, social, societal) to those that the family/person hid, but at the same time experienced and felt. Every family, including this very powerful, well-known and wealthy one, went through ups and downs, and all this can be learnt from the documentation they left behind. Such inner turmoils and struggles, joyful news and successes are best expressed in the letters sent and received by the members of this family. Letters are a kind of small diaries from which we learn the most about the events and the person who writes them, referring to a situation, attitudes about the situation and the feelings it provoked, the literacy of the person writing, the way of expression and similar. The Fonds HR-DAPA-984 The Battiala Family contains a little more than 0.4 linear shelf metres, i.e. 4 boxes of preserved letters from almost all family members. The majority of the preserved letters were written or received by Tommaso Girolamo Nicolò. His letters were arranged by himself or someone else at the time when they were created or received or soon after that, which is evident from the markings on them. These letters are the most diverse and informative in terms of content. The material contained in the Fonds reveals new, sheds light on less known and confirms already known facts about Labin and the Labin region (given names and surnames of local residents, their vocations, the social status of individual families, the relationship between families of higher social status, but also between important and influential people or families of that time from Istria and beyond, as well as the names of streets, localities, microlocations). It is an extremely valuable source for historical research in various scientific disciplines: linguistics, law, economy, medicine, ethnology...