Skip to main content

Hungarian Genealogy: Research Tip #2

The theme of today's tip is: Religion!

Knowing the religion of your ancestors is crucial to moving forward with your genealogy research. Most of the time, in old Hungary, people tended to marry within their own religion. But this wasn't always the case, and you must be cautious of this. It can be very easy to overlook the religion column in the baptism, marriage and death registers, by just assuming they were a specific religion. An ancestor having originally come from a different religion, leaves the door open to an entirely new parish and set of records to search in.

One of the most common mixes of religions in Hungary, is Greek Catholic and Roman Catholic (top image; click for larger view). In this image you can see that the groom, Czundra Mihály, was "rom. kath." (Roman Catholic) and from Lenártó. The bride, Bucsko Maria, was "gr. kath." (Greek Catholic) and from Hrabszke. The next example (bottom image) is a case of a Reformed and Roman Catholic marriage. The groom, Joannes Tsontos (Csontos), was "H.Conf." (Helvetic Confessions; commonly known in Hungary as Reformed). The bride, Catharina Tóth, was "R.Cath." (Roman Catholic). In both examples, there are two different towns of residence and two different religions which result in two different sets of parish registers.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Hungarian Church Records Now Digitized At FamilySearch.org

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...

Hungary Exchange Contest - Win 5 Hours of FREE Research!

I've been thinking about offering a contest over at Hungary Exchange for the past few months, and now is the time! Here are the details: What You Win: 5 FREE hours of professional research. This includes the research & translations, and you're provided with digitized copies of all documents found as well as pedigree and family group reports that display all information found. Rules: 1. You MUST have Hungarian ancestry to be eligible (family with origins within the former Kingdom of Hungary). 2. In order to enter this contest, you must post a comment to this blog post. Within your post please leave your email address (I need to be able to contact you, if you win), and some basic details about the family that you're wishing to know more about. This includes names, dates (estimated is fine), places, etc. The contest ends Sunday, April 14th, 2012, at 11:59pm CST. The winner will be chosen and announced here on this blog Monday, April 15th, 2012. T...

Urbárium Census of 1767

We had previously mentioned the 1767 Urbárium census in our latest  Research Tip #12 , but we felt it needed much more attention. As previously mentioned, these "records were ordered by Empress Mária Terézia in 1767 to help grasp a better understanding of the peasantry of Hungary. The over 300,000 pages of material contains a wealth of information such as how much livestock a peasant had, who the serf owed his obligations to and the amount of land the serf cultivated. These records only provide the name of the 'head' of the household/land. Most images are available for this collection and the front page [of the website] is available in English. Navigation of the documents are easily organized by county and then town or village name, alphabetically. Archaic or older spelling variations for the town or village name may be used. These records are not indexed by name." Carl Kotlarchik and Martin Votruba have created and provided column header translations for the 1767 ...