bavarikon4Ubavarikon4U

The replies from Lower Franconia concerning the “survey” of the Bayerischer Verein für Volkskunst und Volkskunde, 1908/09

111 replies were received in the collection of the “survey” from the administrative district of Lower Franconia. Six of them were originally submitted for Middle Franconia. They come from a region which joined Lower Franconia only after the administrative reform in 1972.

Who replied?

Of the answers identified by name, there was one by a female teacher; all others come from male authors. Three-quarters of them were local teachers, some of them also in senior positions as district head teachers, and about a tenth of them were pastors and mayors. In the latter case, however, only their function in municipal administration is known, not their actual profession. The rest of them include a head forester, a student of German language and literature, an engineer and a city councillor. In three cases, two people responded together. Of 18 authors, neither names nor other details were preserved. In his essay “Volkskunde auf Amtswegen” (Ethnology through the Official Channels, Bayerisches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde 2006, pp. 1–14), Jochen Ramming dealt in detail with the Lower Franconian authors and related source-critical problems. The answers from Lower Franconia are between one and nine pages long in more than half of the cases, a third are up to 19 pages and a tenth up to 29 pages long. Only six contributions have a volume of 30 or more pages, the longest one comes from Obernburg am Main (Miltenberg county) with 80 pages.

Population structure of the villages

In c.1900, a good third of the towns and villages had less than 500 inhabitants, two fifths reached up to 1,000 and a good fifth over 1,000 inhabitants; the statistics do not contain any data on social stratification. The overwhelming majority of the places were of mixed denomination, although in about four-fifths of the places the Catholic, in one-fifth the Protestant denomination prevailed. Inhabitants of Jewish faith were represented in just under one third of the places. However, very few answers deal with differences in faith or denomination. The regional distribution is not quite even; answers from the North and West of Lower Franconia are a little more numerous. The map is described by Torsten Gebhard in his essay “Bemerkungen zur volkskundlichen Umfrage” (Remarks on the Folkloristic Survey, Bayerisches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde 1986/87, p. 12).

Selected collectibles from the “survey” of 1908/09

>> This collection concerns the “survey” of the Bayerischer Verein für Volkskunst und Volkskunde (Bavarian Society for Folk Art and Folklore) from the collection of the Institut für Volkskunde (Ethnological Institute).