HUNGARIAN WOMEN : SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS IN SEARCHING TO DOCUMENT THEM : JEWISH WOMEN AND RECORDS PRO GENEALOGY TIP #4

Think Jewish women and you think of THE MATCHMAKER!

Some years ago I met some people who are working on going through church records to extract Jewish individuals for the use of the website JEWISHGEN. One of them told me that while going through CHURCH records he had to start all over because he had been listing anyone with a Jewish sounding name and didn't realize that some Christians used Old Testament names for their children. (And some people also do not know that "Jewish" surnames in common use (rather than religious use) are often simply names used by Christians also. This was true in Hungary.)

You don't have to be Jewish to find  the website Jewishgen useful. I have an account with them which I use from time to time when I'm helping someone else with their genealogy or if I want town information, location, the various names the place has gone through depending on what nation was ruling it (German names, Slovak names, Polish names), or to see POSTCARDS of the towns. It can be interesting to find out what happened in that town during World War II or the Holocaust. You might interview your Hungarian great-grandmother and ask her what she experienced or witnessed while living in Holocaust era Europe.  Remember that there were some Gentiles who aided Jews in hiding or leaving the country and you might want to run the names and the towns through a web site like Yad Vashem.  (The link is one my sidebar.)  A Yiskor Book is a book that remembers the Jews who died from a town in the Holocaust.  Some of these books are on the Internet, some in translation, some not, and were originally composed by listing people the living remembered.  They may not be comprehensive.

I want to make a mention of Jewish Women in Jewish church or temple records.  In eastern and central Europe a physical church was often the largest, best built, you could say safest place to store records and the priests were sometimes the only educated person who could read or write for miles.  So if there were just a few families that were Jewish who had to travel to their own congregation, the priest recorded their children's births with a note that they were Jewish.  As previously mentioned, finding people listed in Catholic or other Christian church records does not mean they actually attended the church, unless you find it is a mixed marriage or see a record of the baptism of a child. Notice if a birth is recorded without a note of baptism following.

In the previously mentioned 300 years of one small town Catholic church record that I read I found one marriage of a Jewish man and Catholic woman.  They were married in the church and their children were baptized and raised Catholic.  (Kind of like Ms. Charlotte Casiraghi of Monaco and her child with a Jewish comedian, Gad Elmaleh,  Raphael, who was recently Baptised there.)

The idea that a marriage should occur in the bride's church no matter what the religion of the groom here in America or that in Catholic marriage the parents must agree to raise their children Catholic in order to be married in the church doesn't always hold up in the old European records I've seen.

Larger Jewish settlements, places were the Jewish people had their own congregations usually had their own ledgers and records.  I have read these temple ledgers and have discovered that there is a significant difference from contemporary Catholic and Christian church records.  AND THAT IS THAT I FOUND THAT THE MOTHER'S NAME WAS ALWAYS RECORDED and not only that but the name of the midwife and the name of the person who circumcises the baby boy!   This is no doubt because of the belief that a child wasn't Jewish without having a Jewish woman for a mother.

Settlements tended to be about 5 miles from each other, depending on the geographical considerations.  This meant that a person could walk to the next town along a road or using horse or horse and buggy get there in a half day or less of travel.  People knew people and matchmaking was done by friends, families, priests and rabbi's; usually the marrying couple lived not too far from each other.  In Hungarian small towns there seems to be a lot of what I call "childhood sweetheart marriages" among boys and girls who always knew each other and then grew up.  But by the 1900's some boys and girls grew up and didn't obey their parents when it came time to marry.  Love Matches were taking hold.

If you take a good look at old maps or even new ones you'll see a plethora of small settlements and towns listed throughout Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, really all over Europe.

While one person I was in contact with told me his Yeshiva boy grand father would have never associated with the non-Jews in their Polish market town (at the time near the Slovak border) but research the era, the time and the place, especially where there was trade, big markets, and you may find that Jews and Gentiles enjoyed chatting with each other, were doing business, and were not so isolated or offish with each other as all that.

I recently found this site!  HUNGARIAN JEWISH ROOTS

December 2023 link update http://www.jewishroots.hu/en_generalgenealogy_1.html

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HONGROISE 1787-1788 from the NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY DIGITAL COLLECTION

Original Source: From Costumes civils actuels de tous les peuples connus, accompagnés d'une notice historique sur leurs costumes, moeurs, religions, etc. (Paris : Pavard, 1787-1788) Grasset de Saint-Sauveur, Jacques (1757-1810), Author.

note by me: HONGROISE is French.

HUNGARIAN WOMEN : SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS IN SEARCHING TO DOCUMENT THEM : THE ILLEGITIMATE and THE ORPHAN TIP : GENEALOGY #3

Illegitimate births did happen in the Old World, though I'm sure that there was much more taboo associated with it and so there was much more pressure to marry first than there is today in the USA where a huge number of children are born "without fathers" which is to say "without husbands."  To be unmarried was to be unsupported financially for there were no social services, welfare money, Social Security, or other programs.  It was a terrible risk.

We can never know how many children of married women were the result of affairs from birth and baptismal records, though I do wonder about the role of DNA since people are using DNA now to meet relatives who they may not also be able to document if they are the offspring of an affair.

In 300 years of Catholic Church records for one small town I found one listing for a woman who had several illegitimate children. Her children were baptized.  Was that about tolerance, understanding, how devout she was, or a priest who really wanted to save souls?

I had to wonder about this woman.  I wondered if she worked for a seductive noble.  I wondered if she was a person of low intelligence.  How it was that she seemed to be stranded and alone in this town without family?  Maybe she was unusually independent.   Had she been an orphan?  As her children died one after another testifying to illness and poverty I knew that she had to be living on handouts or begging.  And then, when she was in her late 30's an older man married her.  Did he love her?  Was he the father of the children after all?  Or did he think of having a wife as having a necessary servant?

I also read the Jewish record for the closest temple and found many more listings of illegitimate births but that is only a sampling, not meaning that among Jewish women there was overall more illegitimacy.  In these cases it was noted that the women had come from somewhere else meaning that the way pregnant unmarried women were handling their situation was to go away somewhere else to have their baby.

What being born outside marriage means in looking at old Hungarian records is that if your ancestor is the descendent of a woman who gave birth unmarried as Maria Szabo, be they male or female, even if she marries, they will be listed as Szabos on records.  (So far I've found nothing close to a legal adoption recorded in a church record.  I have found children who were orphaned and living with a family with a different surname in which there are notations of the child's birth name and priests notations such as "also known as Huber" which might mean they were born a Huber or simply that the family has more than one name.)

As someone who has an ancestor who was orphaned, I may have some interesting information to share.

Today an orphan means a child LOST BOTH PARENTS.  In the 19th century in Europe and in the deeper past a CHILD WAS AN ORPHAN BECAUSE HE OR SHE LOST THEIR FATHER, the bread winner.  In the case of my orphan ancestor people said she had been "double orphaned."  It turned out that her first natural father died, her mother remarried and then died, leaving a step father who then died.  I think they meant she lost two FATHERS.  I found she and half and step siblings with three different surnames...  Their surnames were their own birth names from various couplings due to deaths and remarriages.

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A SINGLE YELLOW ROSE by ANNA TOTH KOCZAK : THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL

 

A Single Yellow Rose
A Memoir

by Anna Koczak

EXCERPTED FROM THE PUBLISHER:  

When young, ambitious Anna Toth is kicked out of school for opposing the fast-growing Communist movement in her country, Hungary, her future plans are extinguished. So she must take the job she least desires: become a maid.

When a new tenant, American diplomat Stephen Koczak, moves into the apartment she tends to, Anna chooses to work for him, despite opposition from her family, friends, and society in general and despite her growing admiration for him.

When a young, handsome, Hungarian secret police agent named Laszlo asks to date her, she knows she must agree, even though she knows it is an arranged relationship to be used to spy on her and her American boss.

With a forbidden admiration for her boss and a fake courtship with a member of the secret police, Anna's life is left tense and puzzling for months on end.

So when Koczak is forced to leave the country, Anna must decide her fate as well..."

***
Just heard about this book and wanted all you Amerikai Magyroks to know about it!

UNGAROS POSTCARD from THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY DIGITAL COLLECTION

New York Public Library Digital Collection = UNGAROS

HUNGARIAN WOMEN : SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS IN SEARCHING TO DOCUMENT THEM : RELIGION AND STATUS : GENEALOGY TIP #2

In 1711 churches in the countries and counties ruled by the Austrians by law began taking notes like these below. The listings are often in LATIN the universal language of the Roman Catholic Church.  The notes may also be in German, Slovak, Hungarian, Polish - Russian, reflecting the education and ethnicity of the local priest. 

You may find some churches have listings for people who are not Roman Catholic included depending on how small a town or how far it was that people had to travel to go to their Jewish temple or Greek Catholic church.  This was the closest thing they had to a civil registration and be careful when reading their religious information to realize that they are listed not because they actually go to this church but because they live near it! But since Hungary declared itself to be a Christian country after overcoming the domination by Moslem Turks and aligned itself with Roman Catholicism, I'll start there.

CONSIDER THESE SAMPLE LISTINGS.

Maria, daughter of Janos Nagy.  1715  (no mother's name at all.  A fairly worthless listing because of the common names.  Maybe if the person is a noble and has a name like Maria Elizabeta Julietta Szalia (I'm making this up but I've noticed that the more names given the higher the rank of the noble with an average of four names for say the equivalent of a count/graf) the record becomes valuable.

better is:

Maria, daughter of Janos Nagy, Baptised August 1, 1715 (But it's as if the man gave birth!)

better is

Maria, daughter of Janos Nagy, Born July 28, 1715, Baptised August 1, 1715
priest's note : father is farmer.

better is

Maria, daughter of Janos Nagy, Born July 28th, 1715 Baptised August 1, 1725
priest's note : father is farmer.  Mother Maria Toth.  Mother is nobilis.

(You may be convinced that nobilis could only marry nobilis but I've found MANY marriages of mixed status and even mixed religions particularly in towns. As I understand it, the children's status was dictated by their father.  So a noble woman would keep her own status marrying a common person but the issue was that her children lost their noble heritage because of this unequal marriage.  On the other hand some noble women preferred to marry a wealthy commoner rather than a poor noble!  Also today we tend to think that a couple marries in the BRIDE'S church but I've come to believe by reading)

NOW YOU CAN LOOK THROUGH THE CHURCH REGISTER FOR OTHER CHILDREN BORN TO A JANOS NAGY AND A MARIA TOTH, assembling a family group.

NOW YOU CAN ALSO LOOK FOR A MARRIAGE OF THIS COUPLE, based on the oldest child born to them (give it a year or two.)  You may find something like this:

Marriage of the widow Janos Nagy, 45 and the virgin Maria Toth,  18, April 15, 1720.  Husband is a farmer - land owner.

Maria, daughter of Janos Nagy and Maria Nagyne, still born.  December 22, 1721. Baptised by midwife.

Maria, daughter of farmer - landowner Janos Nagy and the nobilis Maria Toth,  Born July 28th, 1715, Baptised August 1, 1725 by Priest Andras Szabo.  (It is common for a couple to name a newly born child the same as a deceased child!)

Janos, son of farmer - landowner from Zemplen, Janos Nagy and the nobilis Maria Toth who was born in Budapest,  Janos Born August 15, 1726, Baptised August 16, 1726 ...

I would like to say that all the records get more informative as they years go by but that hasn't been my experience. 

Priest's notations about status are common even after 1848 and there always seems to be great concern about the father's profession, after all most women didn't work for money.  They were either supported or inherited or became sisters or nuns supported in convents by the Church.

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SZEKELEY WOMEN POSTCARD 1903 FROM NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

DIGITAL GALLERY - NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY  link for full picture information!

Original Source: From Budapest, the city of the Magyars. (New York : James Pott & Co., 1903) Smith, Frank Berkeley, Author.

HUNGARIAN WOMEN : SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS IN SEARCHING TO DOCUMENT THEM : THE MAIDEN NAME IS A NAME FOR LIFE : GENEALOGY TIP #1

GENEALOGY has really reinforced my feminism.  I've seen how women's lives were before there was contraception as an alternative to dying young, worn out from continual pregnancies, or in childbirth itself as a real danger.  I've seen how many children were orphaned in the 19th century. I've seen how few records there are of women's lives compared to men's.  I've seen how men are prioritized historically. 

But before I go too far on a rant about that, I would like to tell you that there is something very unique about HUNGARIAN WOMEN when it comes to documents.

As you know in the Hungarian language the surname comes first and then the given name.  To me there is something very Asian about the language and that.  But did you know that in previous centuries Hungarian women went through their lives traditionally being known by their maiden name?  From birth through marriage and death their maiden name is recorded in church registers and other documents.

Hungarian women are listed in relationship to men surely.  But say a woman was born Maria Toth and she marries Janos Nagy.  She may be listed as Maria Toth, wife of Janos Nagy or Maria Nagyne.  The ne ending denotes possession by a man, in this case Janos Nagy.  It stands to reason that these women thought of themselves as their maiden name at immigration to the U.S,. and so,  when you're looking at ship records and manifests such as the ones offered by the Ellis Island and Castle Rock sites, look for the woman under her maiden name even if she was married at the time, as well as her married name.

You may find a listing such as Maria Toth,  M (married), and in the notes notice that she is going to her husband who has a different surname like Janos Nagy.  The indexing that leads you to these records presently only records the name of the ship passenger, the name on their ticket.  Always keep note of the place she left and the place she is going to and what the relationship is supposed to be.  Then go to that American address on the census next!  You may find that some of your other ancestors are all living together at that location.

One woman I found on a ship manifest coming back from a trip to Hungary was held at Ellis Island for questioning because she said she was a naturalized citizen already but was traveling alone.  In this case the woman gave her married name American style.  I have no idea how she proved that she had been naturalized with a husband who wasn't traveling with her when she couldn't read, write, or speak English, and she clearly had no papers to document this, but I have a feeling her husband probably had to leave Trenton New Jersey, take the train to New York, and go get her!

Posts from this series can be brought up by clicking on the label Pro Tips-Hungary Women

C 2014 MAGYAR AMERICAN BLOG - All Rights Reserved on this and all posts, including Internet and International Rights.