Ioan Pușcariu

Ioan Pușcariu (September 28, 1824 – December 24, 1911) was an Austro-Hungarian ethnic Romanian historian, genealogist and administrator. A native of the Brașov area, he studied law until the 1848 revolution, when he took up arms. After order was restored, he embarked on a four-decade career in government that took him throughout his native Transylvania as well as to Vienna and Budapest. During the 1860s, Pușcariu was involved in the political debates of his province's Romanians, and also helped set up their key cultural organization, the Transylvanian Association for Romanian Literature and the Culture of the Romanian People (ASTRA). His historical interests lay primarily with the Transylvanian Romanians' nobility and their genealogy; Pușcariu's research into the subject secured his election to the Romanian Academy.

Origins and 1848 revolution The first-born son of a Romanian Orthodox priest in Sohodol, a village located in the Transylvania region's Brașov County, In 1834, he entered the German normal school in Brașov, and in 1837, the local Catholic high school. In 1841–1842, he attended the final year of gymnasium at Sibiu, as well as a yearlong theology course. From 1843 to 1845, he took philosophy at the high school in Cluj, remaining for an additional year after completing this cycle. There, his classmates included Nicolae Popea, Avram Iancu and Alexandru Papiu-Ilarian. From 1846 to 1848, he audited courses at the Saxon law faculty in Sibiu. Pușcariu was there when the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 began in Transylvania; and around the same time was named a teacher at the Romanian school in Brașov. In November, he was named assessor (councilor) of the Făgăraș district, as well as inspector of the Mândra area. He was subsequently named commissioner and then circuit judge for the Făgăraș district, holding office from 1850 to 1861. From 1869 to 1890, when he retired, he was a judge on the Curia Regia. He then moved to Bran, near his native village. After his death, Pușcariu was buried in the local family crypt. He and his wife Stana Circa, born in 1831, had four sons: Ion, an engineer and manager in Căile Ferate Române, the state railway carrier of the Romanian Old Kingdom; Iuliu, who became a judge at the court of appeals in Budapest; Emil, a physician and professor at Romania's University of Iași; and Iuliu, a diplomat who represented Austria-Hungary as consul at Tangier and Moscow.

Cultural and political involvement In 1864, thanks to his bureaucratic, administrative and judicial service, Pușcariu was awarded the Order of the Iron Crown, third class, allowing him and his descendants to use the title of knight. He describes the coat of arms he then received in his work on the Romanian noble families of Transylvania. His legal and theological background allowed Pușcariu to help Șaguna draft an organic statute for the church, The same year, he took part in a conference at Miercurea Sibiului, where the National Party of Romanians in Transylvania was created. During the event, the proponents of political passivism and activism clashed; Pușcariu figured prominently in the latter camp, arguing that while the Romanian deputies to the diet had achieved little, they had made their voices heard, and that whatever the Romanians did, the Hungarian and Saxon nations would continue to elect deputies and pass laws. Despite these arguments, passivism, a withdrawal from the political life of the new dualist state, was adopted as an official strategy by a wide margin, and its adherents attacked Pușcariu in their newspapers.

Although his position as a judge barred him from overt political activity, he and Șaguna, through the intermediary of his brother Ilarion, continued to discuss relaunching activism. In 1872, he published a brochure containing a political program, but this was rejected both by the Sibiu party meeting in May and by the conference at Alba Iulia the following month. At that point, he essentially withdrew from politics until making a brief return in 1884, when a Romanian Moderate Party was initiated by Miron Romanul. However, few joined the organization, which was met with disapproval by most of the Romanian populace and by the Hungarian government. He was gladdened by the decision to switch to activism was taken in early 1905 by the Romanian National Party.

He played an important role in the founding of the Transylvanian Association for Romanian Literature and the Culture of the Romanian People (ASTRA), helping to draft the organization's statute, which was approved by Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1861. He then served as an active member, addressing its assemblies and working within the historical section. His maiden speech to the academy, "Ugrinus—1291", focused on history, aiming to rebut Robert Rösler's theory that the ancestors of the Romanians migrated northwards from the south-Danubian area. Pușcariu's view on the origin of the Romanians is that they continually crossed the Danube and the Carpathians, both north and south, from the time of Trajan onwards. His subsequent volumes, chiefly Boierii din Țara Făgărașului, solidified his presence at the forefront of genealogy in the Romanian-speaking lands.

Pușcariu wrote about his own political, scientific and cultural activity, and the material was edited posthumously as Însemnări biografice by Ilarion Pușcariu. His interests extended to his own family history, which he covered in two of his books. Based on preserved tradition, he insisted that a distant ancestor, Iuga, left Maramureș for Moldavia during the reign of Dragoș, after which the family extended into Bessarabia. He asserted that family members crossed into Transylvania in the early 17th century in order to participate in an anti-Ottoman rebellion, and were active in a similar conflict in the first half of the 18th century, during the time of the Cantemirești. He believed they first settled around Cașin and then reached the Brașov area. He was certain that his great-grandfather Bucur, his grandfather Leonte and his father Ioan were all parish priests in Sohodol. He noted that the family used to be called Pușcașiu, connoting a Military Frontier guard (pușcaș meaning "rifleman"). He was the first to be called Pușcariu: in November 1848, revolutionary leaders August Treboniu Laurian and Ioan Bran de Lemény, after he took up the office of assessor, wrote him down as Pușcariu. The rest of the family followed suit in changing its name.