The Official Blog Of Hungary Exchange

Chicago Daily News, Roll 675 25 Nov 1933, Page 11 [Click to enlarge] While conducting newspaper research in Chicago several weeks ago, I came across an article on Hungarian wines to be presented at the 1933-1934 Chicago World's Fair. The fair was otherwise known as the Century of Progress, itself being a celebration of the city's centennial. A transcript of the article is below: " Rare Old Hungarian Wines      to Be Shown at 1934 Fair By John Drury     Rare old wines from the former royal cellars of Budapest, some of the villages dating back a century will be on exhibition in a proposed new Hungarian pavilion at A Century of Progress exposition next year, it was announced today.     The musty old bottles will not be for sale to fair visitor, the announcement added. They will be merely on display and the labels will indicate the ages of the various types of wines. Tokays will be the main feature of the exhibit, but there will also be Burgundi...

Much to the delight of my colleagues and Hungary Exchange Facebook group, many Hungarian church records have become digitized and freely viewable online at FamilySearch.org. You can now browse and enjoy these records at home, instead of needing to frequent your local FHC, and you will spend less money from having to order the microfilm. The Reformed and Roman Catholic baptism indexes, as well as the Jewish Vital Records indexes, don't appear to link up with their proper digitized image yet, so there certainly is still work to be done behind the scenes. Click to enlarge The best way to find your parish is to search the microfilm catalog, under the Place category, at  FamilySearch.org/catalog/search . Most localities will come up this way, however not all villages or towns had a church or synagogue for each religion - hence requiring the citizens to travel to the nearest neighboring village. There are several gazetteers that help guide you to the correct parishes and many o...

Many of our ethnic or national Hungarian ancestors immigrated to America in seek of the freedoms and liberties that our country offered. Hungarians have been finding their way to America for centuries and one of the earliest, if not the earliest, was a Hungarian cavalryman named  Mihály Kováts de Fabriczy . He provided faithful military service during the American Revolution, which ultimately took his life, along with Casimir Pulaski and are known for being the founding fathers of the United States Cavalry. Mihály came from a noble family, their name in Hungarian being 'fabriczi Kováts', and rose through the ranks during his military career to gain the title of Captain of the Huszárs. Mihály had offered his military service to the American ambassador in France, Benjamin Franklin, and one particular portion of his letter written on January 13, 1777 to the ambassador proclaimed his desire for independence and his knowledge of war: "Golden freedom cannot be purchased with ...

An often overlooked Hungarian collection on FamilySearch holds a treasure trove of genealogical information.  Hungary Funeral Notices, 1840-1990   are printed funeral or death notices, similar to obituaries in other counties, and the originals are currently held at the National Széchényi Library (Országos Széchényi Könyvtár, or OSZK) in Budapest, Hungary. Over a quarter of the collection covers Budapest and the remainder for the rest of Hungary, although I have seen notices for individuals in Austria, Germany and what is now Croatia, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia. The funeral notices were preserved on microfilm by the LDS between 2003-2006 and consists of 582 microfilm and can be reviewed in the microfilm catalog . These were later digitized (accessible through both links above), but 9 microfilm still remain to be digitized. It's unclear why Syatmárz, Syecsez, Syeibert, and Syékely are spelled with SY, when it should be SZ. Ebeczki-Blaskovich, Ernő-Edelényi Szabó, Józse...

The FamilySearch database entitled  Austria, Vienna Population Cards, 1850-1896 documented local residents and travelers living in Vienna for the time period of 1850 through 1896, with the original documents being housed in the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv (Vienna City and Provincial Archives). These records have been preserved on microfilm through the LDS and consists of 3,173 microfilm, which can be reviewed here in the microfilm catalog . Although there lacks to be a complete index for this collection, a great deal has already been indexed and provided online. I personally found the search form for this database to be rather limiting, with it not providing an option to search for an individual's place of birth, so I figured out a work-around. Running a basic search for Hungary in the "Any Place" section on FamilySearch pulls back over 31 million results. We can restrict these results to specific Collections through the filter options on the bottom left of the ...

FamilySearch.org's database,  Brazil, São Paulo, Immigration Cards, 1902-1980 ,  has been updated today and many Hungarian immigrants can be found arriving in São Paulo throughout this database. Searching 'Hungria' as the place of birth, which is Hungary in Portuguese, will bring back over 1,400 results for São Paulo immigrants who were born in Hungary. The content is entirely in Portuguese, so you will need to ready your dictionaries and Google Translate. The best part? Most have pictures of the individuals! I particularly like  José Furst's  fun tie in his picture. There is the chance that you will run into spelling variations because of the language differences, such as with this example of the widowed Etelka Izsó's immigration card that was filed in 1920. Her name appears as Etelko Izso and her parent's names as Antol Izso and Lidia Tokoic. Anyone familiar with Hungarian genealogy would know that Antol is correctly spelled as Antal and that her mother...