The winds of change in Hungarian Research

                     I have been transcribing the Hungarian census of 1869 from microfilms for many years at my Family History Center. It's still my favorite census to work on as it's so detailed. Today, the entire Hungarian 1869 census is online at FamilySearch. Although not indexed, it is available to anyone who can read the language. It is a dream come true to have these records online. With these changes breathing new hope into finding ancestors in Hungary online for everyone, I decided to change the directions of where the winds of my work will blow. It will be blowing closer to home.

Believe it it not, the American-Hungarian research sinews are fragile. The other day it occurred to me that my children are the generation of Americans who will be further away from any remembrance of their Hungarian origins as the years go by. My kids never heard the Hungarian language spoken in their home as my grandfather was deceased by the time they were born. They only ate a few of the old recipes. The churches in our American-Hungarian communities are closing epidemically around the country with their ethnic festivals and traditions fading away. Unless someone in your family is doing the family's history, our next generation of Americans will not get interested. Unless they increase the country's spending on keeping libraries, archives and free internet availability of resources to do research, the genealogy world will just get smaller and only belong to the privileged few as it becomes commercialized.

I am thanksful for volunteers who digitalize, transcribe and index records. We are lucky that the LDS church share their records with the public. We are indebted to organizations like GenWeb, Rootsweb, Wikitree and We Relate who propose to always keep genealogy free for our future genealogists. We are indebted to website providers like Blogger who encourage people to share their family research for free online. In our own Hungarian genealogy realm, we are fortunate for talented people like Nick Gombash, Judy Vanish Mann, Sara Krasne, Judy Peterson, Elizabeth Long, Juraj Cisarik, Lisa Alzo, Smallest Leaf, Peter Nagy, Bill Tarkulich, Janos Bogardi and countless other Hungarian research specialists who tirelessly share with others. 

There are some local Hungarian-American churches closing in my neighborhood and their records are astray. I am working to get these records available on microfilm, digitalized or indexed for researchers. It will require some activism on my part but feel it will be a worthwhile contribution to our Hungarian - American genealogical research community.