Up until about 1848 this area of Eastern Europe was still organized in the pattern of the manorial system, that is, it was covered by great estates owned by the aristocracy, but worked by the common people who were called serfs. When the estates were dissolved, the serfs became free to purchase some land if they could. By the dawn of the twentieth century, most village families owned and cultivated their own piece of land. In the parish records a landowner is noted in Hungarian as ‘gazda’ and someone who worked the land of another was a ‘zseller’ [the same as ‘cottager’ in some countries]. The number of men designated as gazda increased as the years passed.

The village farmers worked in cooperation with one another to raise their crops and tend their animals. Each farmer’s acreage extended out from the village in parallel contiguous strips. Each one grew the same crop in the same year, rotating to a different crop the next year. The village women worked in the fields as well as tending to their household duties.

Though individually owned, the animals were herded together. By five o’clock each morning the cows, sheep and goats were turned into their yards. Men assigned to care for them herded the animals into the woods to graze and returned them home in the evening. Baba thinks this job was done by younger sons who had no land to farm and who were paid either in cash or in bushels of grain or other crops.

In the summertime school children, including Baba, had the job of pasturing the animals each day. It was hard work to move the animals up into the woodsy foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, but once there the children had a little time for relaxing and playing games while keeping one eye on the animals. They brought lunch with them, usually a few raw potatoes which they roasted over a fire they built. After dark the young people told stories around the fire and were sometimes frightened by ghosts that spooked their animals and seemed to inhabit the mountains after sunset. The ghosts made such an impression on the children that in later years they were a favorite topic when relating experiences about the old country. One of the few things I know about the childhood of my grandfather, John Bubnash, is that he truly believed in ghosts, for he had experienced them while herding sheep in the Carpathian Mountains.

Agrarian life was not without its hazards. When Baba was six or seven years old she went near the barn where the threshing machine was running and foolishly began to play around the machine. The belt caught her left index finger, nearly ripping it off. Somehow she managed to get her hand out without sustaining a more serious injury. The finger was skillfully sewn and bandaged by her mother. Her finger healed well enough to be usable, though it was crooked all of her life.