A how-to guide for researching hungarian ancestors

The first step would be to take a piece of paper and write down all the information you have on your ancestor, including each tiny detail you might think insignificant. Then go to

familysearch.org and make an account for yourself. You will be asked to fill in details about your parents, their parents, and so on. Once you have done this far back enough, suggestions for

birth records will start to appear — and in other cases they will not, and I will come back to that. When you read these records, make sure you use all information within the lines

belonging to your ancestor. In my view, when you already have so little to go on, every little bit counts and most often I find my clues this way. CLUES? The way I build up my research is by

going backwards in time, following lines of birth, marriage, and death — on repeat. This method rarely fails me and I can guarantee it will not fail you either. The trick to getting leads

from such a small amount of information is to look for these two columns; ‘parents’ place of birth and current living’ and ‘comments’. To expand on that thought, first off, when you find a

birth record, keep looking in the same register for more births by the parents, and the way to make sure they are the same parents is to make sure their details match up. Secondly, look for

the parents’ marriage record because that in most cases will give you more information to go on, i.e. their ages, places of birth, and their parents. And an additional detail you will need

to find that document is the mother’s birth place — marriages happened in the bride’s birth parish. A handy detail to know in any case! So back to where I was going with those two important

columns; the parents’ place of birth and current living will give you which parish registers you will find their birth records in. And the comments section on a baby’s birth certificate can

give you two types of additional information if you look at it carefully. One of them will be a date of death and another a date of marriage. Usually it is one or the other, or none. TYPES

OF RECORDS There are two types of registers in the Hungarian system; church and civil. Church records date from anywhere up to 1895 and civil records start from 1895. The year 1895 is

divided between the two registers depending on the parish. Church records will look like this. On the left page you have the date of birth and baptism, baby’s name, parents’ name, religion,

occupation and their place of birth and where they live now. On the right page you have the godparents, pastor, and in the very last column you have the comments. Now, not all parish records

will look the same but in general the most important details will be included in each document. Scribbling down a rough translation of column titles comes in handy in my opinion. Don’t

forget these snipets of information will be all you have to work with. There is a lot more to say about parish records in general. Like I already mentioned, the bride gets to have her

wedding in her birth parish, and as a consequence any children from that marriage will be baptised in her faith, although there was no one size fits all in mixed marriages either. In any

case, remember she would be married in that church even if her children were baptised in a different one, and not necessarily in the husband’s birth place. Keep in mind that back in those

days women moved out of their parents’ home only after the wedding so it makes sense they got married there, too. All this changed a bit by 1895 when the right of official registration was

taken away from the church and given to civil authorities. You could still have a church wedding to this day but since that time you have to make it official in a town or village hall,

regardless of faith. And despite all feelings of newness, this made registration of the population more inclusive, and simpler. To give you an example of how civil records look like, here is

a birth record from 1898. You can see these ones have bigger spaces for information, a whole page per person in case of a birth certificate. A marriage record would have two! Of course they

also changed with time and different layouts have been around but generally they are a lot more generous with details than let’s say early 19th century documents usually written in a short

line or two, in latin. At the top, you have the place and date of registration, and the name and occupation of the person requesting it. Under that you have details of the father, mother,

and child. This type of birth record is very useful for all the information it gives about the parents! Also there is the valuable comments section, which here does not tell you anything

interesting but believe me, it might, and that can be a game changer. (Think of claiming paternity of an illegitimate baby, adoption, etc.) And last but not least, there you have that empty

strip in the middle between the two records,one of which is filled with text. When it is not empty, it is either filled with a date of marriage or death, and on occasion with some rare bits

of information specific to that person’s life. For example, one of my ancestors had the naturalisation of their surname documented there. REGISTRY DISTRICTS Remember what I said earlier

about the possibility of there not being record suggestions while filling in more details for your ancestors? In any case, even if you do get those suggestions and they are the correct ones,

you will still need to know how to manually search for various records. For birth, marriage, and death certificates you will need to search the catalogue on familysearch.org, which I am

linking to here. You type in the name of the parish you are looking for and it will take you to its catalogues. Once you expand them, you should see something like this. Here in this town,

as you can see, there were three religious communities; Roman Catholic Church, Calvinist Church, and the Jewish Community. When you look up registry districts, in a way this makes it very

straightforward for you to know if this will be the place your Evangelical or Greek Catholic ancestor would have been recorded in or not. Simply if you do not see your ancestor’s religious

community under a registry district then it will not be their registry district. Interestingly because of how important it was to only attend your own church, it happened that X person was

living in X village big enough to have its own registry office, said person belonging to Z faith ended up commuting between X and Z village to attend Z church’s registry. And well then, you

will feel relieved that the introduction of civil registration put an end to such complications! But not really. Take registry district changes, for example, between the 1910s and 1960s

there were frequent changes. After the end of WWII, territories belonging to former Austria-Hungary were divided up between neighbouring countries, and so from then on they were under a

different jurisdiction all of a sudden, and just in general some district boundaries changed overtime, a village your ancestors lived in could have belonged to multiple registry offices

within 100 years. How to find out which one it belonged to in a specific year? Usually a quick google search will tell you that. If not, take a look into neighbouring villages’ records and

see if you can find entries mentioning your village’s name. And that is all there is to researching family lines and keep extending them. There is a lot I have not talked about, like

immigration records, land records, etc., which are also very interesting to look into. Stay tuned for more.❤️