Hungarian Village Finders for Newbies

       

 With the exciting updates of the Hungarian collections at Family Search, many new researchers find themselves very confused about WHERE exactly their immigrants hailed from in Hungary. Perhaps one knows the origins through family traditional stories but did not know that the borders of the country has changed many times in the past 300 years or more ?

In the old days, my family swore up and down that their family was never in Hungary but Czechoslovakia. Later on, when I studied the historical timelines, I realized that my family were correct but ultimately placed their village in Slovakia  (only 1/2 mile from the border of Hungary) since the velvet divorce of the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993. Technically it was still in Hungary, then their village was in Czechoslovakia for a period of 74 years. Now it's in Slovakia. So in essence, my Great-Grandparents' village lived through three country changes.

One of the neat things happening at Family Search is the wiki for information about anything dealing with finding records for Hungarian or Slovakian, Czechoslovakian villages. 

This is a great one: https://www.familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Hungarian_Village_Finder

Some Historical background here: https://www.familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Research_in_the_Austro-Hungarian_Empire

For my regions, I like to consult RADIX a lot. He is a treasure chest of many resources, especially about finding microfilms at FHL. There is one jewel of a page that lists FHL film numbers which is synced with many gazetteers. It's truly is a lifeline for those of us lost among volgyek and síkságoks and erdők !

Radix is at: http://www.bogardi.com/gen/

The 1877 Dvorzsák Gazetteer is at  http://kt.lib.pte.hu/cgi-bin/kt.cgi?konyvtar/kt03110501/tartalom.html

There is a product out there in the market. I am not endorsing it as I have never used it but I wanted to mention it for the newbies out there. I always had to deal with a lot of old paper maps and the mapping utilities on the internet but I think if I was starting out again, I may have saved myself many hours by a tool like this one: http://www.hungarianvillagefinder.com/

If you are really stumped to unravel an immigrant's village, you can always post your query at the Hungarian Gen Web or message boards. One is at www.genealogy.com which has been around for a long time so make sure to search the archives there first to see if anyone has asked for the same family name in same location. The specific link for Hungarian posts is : http://genforum.genealogy.com/hungary/.

The other one is at ROOTSWEB: http://boards.rootsweb.com/localities.ceeurope.hungary/mb.ashx. Once again , search the archives there for your village.

My personal favorite way to get help is from the people who run the the list for Hungarian Research: http://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/index/intl/HUN/HUNGARY.html. I subscribe to their mailing list.

And there may always be some helpful Hungarian genealogists contributing at >>>: http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~wghungar/

There is also a panel of volunteers who can also help with locations, translations and Hungarian genealogy at the community forum of HUNGARY EXCHANGE which is spearheaded by Nick Gombash. It's a facebook group and you need to join. It's located at https://www.facebook.com/groups/341374479864 .