Picture this research dilemma scenario for your Hungarian research: You finally found the naturalization records for your great- grandfather and it contains the name of his birthplace; Or you think you found him in the Ellis Island database with a village mentioned in their records. Perhaps you found his American marriage record at the Reformed church and it lists his place of origins. However, when you look at the map or Wikipedia, it does not come up. FamilySearch recently released a helpful place locator tool that not only assists you greatly in narrowing down the village, but also leads you to the catalog of the actual records for his village. The perfect instruction that describes the place locator is here at this link: http://tinyurl.com/kb4876s 1.
With the borders fluctuating so much, even in the lifetime of your ancestor, it's hard to pin the actual name of the native location in Hungary. With this place locator search function, not only can you enter the Magyar names of his original location that were written in the records but since that particular village's name may have gone through a couple metamorphoses, those names may also pop up as you use this tool when you type in the letters. The trick is to type slow and see what pops up. If the spelling was a little off (and most spellings usually are when you find records), the stem root of the name in the beginning will show a selection which helps one narrow down their selections. For instance, if I type in, J-A-B-L-O-, and so on, for my village of Jabloncza , then all the towns with that stem root will materialize showing totally different places but one of them may be the one I want ! The nice thing about this place locator tool in FamilySearch is they will not only bring up the town's historical names but also the contemporary one if they have the records. If they do not have the records, you may be out of luck but at least, this is a good start. With the continual updates of the FamilySearch collections, your village may show up.
1. The original address for the article on FamilySearch's HOW-TO on place locators is at https://familysearch.org/blog/en/enhancements-familysearch-catalog/?utm_source=4YourFamilyStory.com+Blog+Posts&utm_campaign=fe8c0c3e3b-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_534e7d63ae-fe8c0c3e3b-326819757
No comments:
Post a Comment