Keep going ....to Krásna Hôrka

        This record from 1768 shows a lady named Helena Szolnoky (aka Szolnik) who died, at the age of 62, in her village, Varalja. This was a hamlet that was located at the bottom of a cone-shaped hill under the towers of a medieval fortress called Krazna Horka, also known as Krásna Hôrka. It's located in Slovak Ore country and presently operates as a castle museum of local history. When Helena Szolnoky - the spelling of her surname varies -  was born in 1702, Varalja was in the province of Gömör in Hungary. This is not the oldest record I have for this family but it was nice to see this record so beautifully written in the Latin clerical scribe and intact after 250 years in some church vault. Hungarian women are generally written with their maiden names so if I did not know from the baptismal records of her children that she was married to Andras Mész, I would not have spotted her.  Because her age is given in her death record, I was able to pinpoint her baptismal as well as the baptismal of her siblings and then, went further back to a marriage record in 1722 for her parents. The handwriting was not consistent so I had to really strain to read the 1720's records. I try different lighting on the microfilm viewers, move to more modern readers with zoom capabilities, turn the lights off in the room, make negative copies. I tried all the tricks in the book to focus and decipher the records .

         I was lucky with this one Szolnik /Mész family as they are natives of the village since the records were started in 1686.  I think they were miners or trades people. They are not listed in 1715 census. I actually traced  the family of Mész from an earlier record in Roznava, another mining town in Gömör, to the marriage here in KraznaHorka-Varalja.  I found records for all their life events and will keep going, especially since I have received DNA contacts linked to this region. 

You can see the Krazna Horka Castle area, which is a tourist attraction with dramatic Hungarian history, in these links

Krásna Hôrka

The Krásna Hôrka Castle

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 .

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