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
To bring up other posts from this series click on the label Pro Tips-Hungary Women
