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 .

Using FamilySearch Export function in Slovakian and Hungarian records

FamilySearch (www.familysearch.org) have some new developments at their website. One of the most amazing tool is the EXPORT functions of records. If you use spreadsheets to organize your family genealogy in any fashion, you will accomplish much by downloading the exports into spreadsheets and adjusting them to make sense on the worksheets. It beats data entry and it saves time. Once you master the cleaning up of the spreadsheets after the export, you will have a nice arrangement of data.

If you are doing a one-place study, you can export all the indexed records (with their transcriptions errors) that are available. For instance, I am working with the surname of "Adam" in the village of Szilas, in Abaúj-Torna, in Hungary. I go to the Hungary Catholic records collection at FamilySearch. I plug the surname ADAM in the surname field and then, I put  SZILAS in the residence place field. Many Adams come up, so I click on any Adam from SZILAS and a record comes up. I then click on the GSU batch number located in the right sidebar as "GSU 62336 ". Up pops all of these people with birth records in SZILAS. You will see that there are 22,653 records indexed in Szilas . Do I want all these records? Absolutely not but I can have fun looking at all of them if I have a whole day.

As the surname ADAM begins with " A", I click through to see how many pages of ADAMS there are in this SZILAS collection. I have an option in " Number of results to show"; I select 75. I can also replace the number 75 with the number 100 in the URL field if I want to see 100 records. It will not go further than 100, though.

Then, I click EXPORT ! Presto. It's that easy.  By the way, the EXPORT function only works if you SIGN IN with an account. You do not have to be an LDS member to have an account. Another important thing to notice is that each individual set of collection has a different interface of fields. For instance, Hungary Reformed did not have a residence place field but Hungary, Civil Registration, 1895-1980 had one.

Epidemics in genealogy

Pandemics and epidemics are a reality of research that cannot be avoided when doing genealogy. When I started genealogy at the age of 17, I was photographing cemetery stones when I landed on one marker‘s inscriptions where the father and his children died all in one day. I wrote about it here.
The other day, I was looking for a particular death record in Csötörtök, Pozsony, Hungary. I am in the years between 1865-1867 and see a cholera breakout.
Pgs. 197-198. Catholic Church Record: Csötörtök, Pozsony, Hungary. Now called Štvrtok na Ostrove, Slovákia

Pgs. 197-198. Catholic Church Record: Csötörtök, Pozsony, Hungary. Now called Štvrtok na Ostrove, Slovákia

The cause of every death recorded on this page was cholera. Sometimes pages like this one goes on throughout a a length of time in months. By the way, this is a really good pandemic history timeline for references to locations of Cholera outbreaks in the Asia and Europe at this link about Eastern Europe plagues.

sources: Wikipedia: Epidemics

I dreamed of genealogy ~ in Slovakia at Family Search.

          This is a glimpse of what I dreamed last night!  As any genealogist knows, they mostly live, eat, sleep and breathe around the timing of when Family Search will "update" their digital images of records from their archives. For many months, I have not had the urgency to check the digital archives online as I knew (by heart) when their last updates surfaced and already mined what I needed.

Digital images online are a godsend. I still order many, many films and wait the proper 4-8 weeks at our library to read them at scheduled intervals but there is no doubt that as life gets more complicated with schedules, online research is a lifesaver. There is no thrill like seeing these hand-written books online .

Late last night, when I was resigning to an early bedtime, a colleague sent out the crucial alert on our forum that the LDS updated the Slovakia Churches and Synagogues collection ! Not only did I not sleep, but a blizzard pulled in to keep me working ! 

So if anyone is working on their Hungarian, Slovakian, Croatian records, the website is :

https://familysearch.org/search/collection/show#uri=http://familysearch.org/searchapi/search/collection/1554443

And if you not sure of the locations of the records, check the locations table at :

https://familysearch.org/learn/wiki/en/Slovakia_Church_and_Synagogue_Books,_Place_Names_Table_(FamilySearch_Historical_Records