The family

Serbian family names grow out of a baptismal name and the ending -ić (Hungarian -ics), which marks descent from the first bearer of the name: Nikolić means a descendant of Nikola, the Serbian form of Nicholas. The first letter of nobility, of 1694, names three brothers, Manojlo, Petar and Slavon Nikola. During the eighteenth century the forms Nikolić and “Nikola alias Nikolić” came into use, with the Latinised Nicolics; from 1783 only Nicolics is written, and with a c. The forms in use today are set out below.

On 26 March 1694 King Leopold I gave Hungarian nobility with a coat of arms to the brothers Manojlo, Petar and Slavon Nikola, and to Manojlo’s wife Ana. The grant was an armales, a letter of ennoblement, and it was published the same year at the assembly of Pest County. The arms themselves have a page of their own.

The descendants of the three brothers lived in Pest, Buda, Ráckeve and Szentendre, and some reached Lugoj and Čakovo. The register of the nobles of Pest County keeps 29 notes on members of the family between 1694 and 1810, many of them made when a member asked the county for a certificate of nobility: a nobleman without land needed one to claim his rights, and to settle in another county. In 1811 Manojlo and Karitón Nikolić came to Čakovo and proved their kinship with old Jovan Nikolić of Rudna so that their nobility would be recognised; nothing more is known of them. The manuscript’s author does not know what became of the other Nikolić families, still many at the end of the eighteenth century. They remained simple armalists, nobles without a predicate, and the author suggests that, with nothing to set them apart, the awareness of belonging to a noble family faded with time.

Petar’s son Đorđe received the nickname Hadži, given to those who had been to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, a journey much harder then than now and one their descendants prized. The nobility papers of 1783 recall it. Đorđe’s son was Jovan, and Jovan’s son, also called Jovan, is the man who bought Rudna.

Jovan Nikolić — in the documents of the time “Nikola alias Nikolić” — appears from 1772 in Osijek, in Slavonia, as a trader who was mainly active in the school system set up across the country under Empress Maria Theresa’s Ratio educationis publicae. Between 1772 and 1782 he also traded with “Persian wool” factories in Vienna and Linz, and founded such workshops in the country.

In 1782 the tax authorities of the counties of Temes and Torontál, set up after the final expulsion of the Turks, were selling many estates and domains in the Banat. Jovan Nikolić bought the Rudna estate together with his father-in-law, Todor Janković of Mirijevo, for 52,028 gulden and 22¾ kreuzer. One local article puts the purchase in 1781.

The manuscript says nothing more about Todor Janković. A local article of 2026 describes a “Teodor Iancovici de Mirievschi” as a senior imperial official who helped organise schooling in the Banat; no source says whether he is the same man.

Only nobles could own land, and the tax authority burdened the purchase because it did not accept Jovan’s proof of nobility. He therefore proved it through the processus productionalis provided for in the Libri Regii, the royal registers; the manuscript’s author says he read all the original documents of that procedure. As a result Emperor Joseph II confirmed Jovan’s old nobility on 18 April 1783, by act no. 3400/1783.

Jovan later paid his partner Janković out and became the sole owner of Rudna. In 1792 he took part, as a delegate, in the Diet at Pressburg (today Bratislava), where Francis was crowned, and was made a Knight of the Golden Spur, an old Hungarian honour given only during a coronation. He also held the court title Aulae Regiae Familiaris, which the manuscript equates with court stolnik, and was counsellor to the appeal courts of the counties of Torontál, Temes and Syrmia — in those days not an official post but a nobles’ office for aristocrats well versed in law. Between 1788 and 1801 he gave large sums of money, produce and grain for the wars against the Turks (1788 and 1789) and the French (1794, 1796, 1800 and 1801).

In 1787, already the owner of Rudna, he was put at the head of the administration of the Serbian schools in Osijek; in 1810 he became co-administrator of the Serbian National Fund.

Jovan Nikolić had no children. He adopted a young man, Jovan Belčić, born in Zemun in 1776: his father was a burgher of Zemun, and his mother, Marta, was born in Irig, in Slavonia, in 1747. The manuscript calls this adopted son the ancestor of the whole family.

We are not descendants of old Nikolić; we are actually Belčić.

At the old man’s request King Francis I approved, on 14 August 1804 and by act no. 8113/1804, the donation of the Rudna estate “from our faithful Jovan Nikolić, counsellor of the appeal courts, Knight of the Golden Spur, court stolnik, to his adopted son Jovan Belčić, who shall henceforth bear the name Nikolić”. The act approved the adoption, the transfer of nobility and arms, and the giving up of the name Belčić, which Jovan had borne until then.

Jovan Belčić, a Nikolić from 1804, became the owner of Rudna; the manuscript calls him the ancestor of most noble families of the Banat. His first wife was Jelisaveta, daughter of Anastas and Marija Karamat of Zemun. They had a son, Jovan (VII), and three daughters: Marija married Jovan Atanasijević of Valeapaj, Jelisaveta married Baron Stefan Duka of Kadar, and Sofija married Konstantin Manasije of Hodon. His second wife was Alojzija, daughter of Petar Tekelija of Kevermes and Katarina Szaplonczay of Tivadar; they had two sons, Petar and Šandor. In 1825 he bought the Macedonia estate from the Jovanović-Vidak family. He died in 1828; Lendvai’s pedigree gives 1830.

By his will of 1828, Jovan (VII) received Macedonia, and Petar and Šandor received Rudna. Rudna then counted 5,780 jutros with 48½ peasant holdings, called “sessions”, and Macedonia 2,000 jutros with 62½. To balance the shares, Jovan was given a further 600 jutros of Rudna land. A jutro, or hold, is about 0.58 hectares, so Rudna was about 3,300 hectares and Macedonia about 1,150 (conversion by the archive).

On 16 October 1831 Jovan (VII) married Jelisaveta “Savka” Obrenović, daughter of Prince Miloš Obrenović of Serbia. The marriage tied the family to the princely house; its story has a page of its own.

They had five sons. Milan and Mladen died in childhood, in 1840 and 1849, and Miloš as an adult, in 1863. Fedor was for five years Civil Adlatus of Bosnia — the manuscript calls the post “Civil Governor” — and a Privy Councillor. Mihajlo, the manuscript adds, was the father — by adoption — of the man to whom it is addressed.

In 1854 an Austrian barony was conferred on Jovan (VII) and extended to his sons Miloš, Fedor and Mihajlo. The sources give two different days for the grant: 18 November and 22 April.

Jovan (VII) died at Rudna on 10 May 1880.

Petar, Jovan (VII)’s half-brother, sold his share of Rudna in 1875 to his nephew — Fedor, according to a local newspaper — and withdrew to Žitište, where he died in 1878. His son Ivan died without children.

Šandor, the other half-brother, sold his share of Rudna in 1873. He then sat several times in parliament, was a župan — head of a county — for ten years, and died in 1897 according to the manuscript, in 1893 according to Lendvai’s pedigree.

The manuscript is neither signed nor dated. It was written after 1903, since it speaks of the Obrenović as the “former” royal line, and it is addressed to Jovan Thierfelder. Its editors suggest, as a working hypothesis, that it was written by Šandor’s son, Šandor II (1878–1926), who in 1913 was a state secretary in the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior.

Fedor, the second son of Jovan (VII), died at Rudna on 27 February 1903, after a long illness. About 4,000 mourners came to his funeral on 4 March, and he was laid in the family chapel on the estate. His will named his son Fedor II universal heir. The page on Baron Fedor tells his life.

Mihajlo (1841–1916), the last member of the family covered by the manuscript, adopted Jovan Thierfelder, the man to whom it is addressed. With the royal consent of 1905 Thierfelder became an Austrian baron, with the predicate “of Obrenov”.

Local press reports that in 1919 the baron’s son sold the Rudna manor and settled in France. Fedor II had been named universal heir in 1903, which makes him the likely seller; no source says so. The story of the family told here ends with that year.

At the end of its fourth section the manuscript lists the names borne now or formerly by people whose common ancestor is Jovan Nikolić, and who are, it concludes, the reader’s blood relatives: Nikolić of Rudna; Baron Nikolić of Rudna; Baron Nikolić of Obrenov; Graf Hardegg; Wich von der Reuth; Atanasijević of Valeapaj; Bajić of Varadija; Baron Bajić of Varadija; Baron Trautenberg; Baron Tallián von Vizek; Weszely; Baron Duka; Pattyanszky von Viszág; Rónay von Kis-Zombor; Čarnojević of Mača and Mali Orosin (today Rusko Selo, Kikinda, North Banat District); Manaszy von Hodony; Baron Manasije-Barko; Niamessny von Almánfalva; Tömöry. The author also prepared a second table for the Obrenović family and all its descendants, to show the reader’s degree of kinship with the former royal line, and the double kinship with the Bajić family.

Every dated event used in this archive, in order. The marker shows the kind of event; a mark in the margin shows where the sources differ, or where a statement rests on a single report.

The manuscript was written with three genealogical tables, drawn as trees and read from the bottom up. Table A covers the descendants of the three brothers ennobled in 1694, from the end of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth, in five generations. Table B covers all the descendants of Jovan Belčić, from the end of the eighteenth century to the author’s day, in six generations. Table C covers the Obrenović family and its descendants, in seven generations. Families linked by marriage are marked in red, and rises in noble rank and other important facts in blue. The three tables are not in the museum’s file. This archive redraws parts of Tables A and B, reading from left to right, from Lendvai’s pedigree, the manuscript’s text and the other sources, with the same colours; the Obrenović table is drawn on its own page.

This archive records only members of the family who are deceased and who appear in the published record. Later generations kept their genealogy private, and it is not recorded here. The family’s story is told to 1919.