POLISH, CZECH and SLOVAK GENEALOGY by LIZA A. ALZO

POLISH CZECH and SLOVAK GENEALOGY
 by  Lisa A. Alzo



Since so many Hungarians have united in marriage with people from Polish, Czech, and/or Slovak heritage, both in Europe and in the United States, I wanted to read this book, which is very informative and has loads of information, some of which even the very experienced genealogy researcher might find helpful.


For instance,  On pages 134-135  we learn that there was such a thing as PARISH CENSUS and POPULATION REGISTERS.  


A parish census is different than the usual birth, marriage, and death records because it is a census of all the people in the parish, even if maybe that year they had no sacramental going on. 


A population register is different because in some European countries a person was required to register their PLACE OF RESIDENCE, and these records can give you the person's name, birthdate, and birthplace, as well as family relationship, parents' name and marital status.


There are extensive website and publication lists in the back of the book.  There are also lists of commonly encountered words in Polish, Czech, or Slovak when you're trying to read typical genealogy records.  There's an example of a Polish CIVIL Marriage record which was brimming with detail (once translated) from 1863; It mentioned  the age and occupations of the witnesses as well as their marital status, that the marriage was religious, and that the newly-weds stated that there was NO PRENUPTUAL AGREEMENT BETWEEN THEM!


Although the author finds forums valuable, I never have.  I've wasted a lot of time on them reading pleas from people who expect to find relatives, not through genealogy, but because they are social networking, and these people rarely give the kind of details that would convince the researcher that there's a connection.  They think their surname, which may be difficult to spell or pronounce is so unusual or that there is a village in common is all someone needs to know.  I also wonder at the personal information being given to the world that is and should be private in this pursuit.  Finally, once or twice I read something on a forum that triggered some interest, but by the time I had my research to the point where I was more convinced of a connection, that person's contact link or e-mail was no longer good, or I never heard back from them anyway. Sometimes I think forums are just full of inexpert or lazy people.


All in all, this is book worthwhile your time!


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AUGUST 20 is SAINT STEPHEN'S DAY IN HUNGARY

AUGUST 20th is SAINT STEPHEN'S DAY IN HUNGARY. There are state celebrations such as firework displays as Saint Stephen is credited with FOUNDING HUNGARY and making it a Christian nation in 1000 AD. It is his crown that it used as an icon for Hungary and the real crown still exists. But that's not all that exists. When Stephen was canonized as a saint on August 20 1083, it was found that he his hand was still "fresh" and so it was removed and is mummified and on display (It looks kind of gray!)

GOING FOR THE BERN WHEN THERE IS NO BERNIE SANDERS!

It's almost old news that the AMERICAN DEMOCRAT-SOCIALIST CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT, Bernie Sanders,  has failed to gain the ticket to Presidency. 

However, considering the CLINTON's have been campaigning for years and have what we call THE PARTY MACHINE in their favor,  SANDERS PROVED TO BE AMAZINGLY COMPETITIVE.  he touched the hearts and souls of so very many who know that we need to do more as a country for our citizens who make average incomes or less and who are struggling.

Since he ran on the Democratic ticket, Sanders was obliged to say that all votes for him should now go to Hilary Clinton.  I forgave him.  The bad news was that he is not a "write in" candidate.

I like thousands of others thought they could, but it turns out that if you want to be a "write in" candidate you have to file to be on the ticket - of each state - individually.  It was too late.

Sanders went back to be the Senator he was before his run.
But believe me when I say that he is not forgot, nor is his message forgotten.

On the bike path nearby where I live, his GRASS ROOTS SUPPORTERS took chalk and wrote their own messages encouraging people to vote for him.

He was the only candidate that had volunteers who had not been down to campaign headquarters making home made signs and holding them up for hours at high traffic intersections.

I had not seen this kind of GRASS ROOTS SUPPORT for any candidate in my lifetime.

Will the amazing show of support that he had when it came to the Democratic Primaries actually change the platform of that party and lead to some or any of the changes that the people who spoke up about what they wanted from him with their vote?

I've been vocal about my candidate and why I wanted him to be our President.

First, I must say that from the very beginning I suspected that DONALD TRUMP really wanted the Democrats to win the next Presidency.  Every time I read another article about him I wince.  The man has a real talent for putting his foot in his mouth and having to backtrack to say what it was he really meant.  I've met many people who say they will vote for him because they see his personal business success as an indicator that he can pull our country out of the economic crisis it has been in for so very many citizens for years now.

However, TRUMP doesn't always succeed in business.
And our national debt went to nothing when we had PRESIDENT WILLIAM J. CLINTON in the White House.

There's just one problem for me with THE CLINTONS, and it's a big one.

I can understand that some people get married and take their vows seriously yet that marriage can be difficult and that sometimes one or both of them go ahead and fall in love with someone else, or have an affair.  Several of my friends through the years have done just that.

There's that, and then there is the womanizing that "Bill" has apparently been committed to for years.  It wasn't just Monica Lewinsky, who has had a very difficult life over the public exposure of her romance with Bill (for surely she was in love with him), that he was womanizing with.

Some people say to me, "Well, JKF did that too. and Jackie put up with it."

Yes, but Jackie wasn't an IVY LEAGUE EDUCATED CAREER WOMAN who MADE AN OUTSTANDING AMOUNT OF MONEY (more than Bill for some time) AS A LAWYER.

I could even understand why Jackie or Hillary would "stand by their man" while he was still in office.  However, I DO NOT ADMIRE HILLARY CLINTON FOR NOT DIVORCING BILL,.

NO these TWO are members of a POWER COUPLE for whom, grand mothering aside, ARE NO EXAMPLE TO US of PERSONAL MORALITY.  And that to me should be considered.

SO I LIKE THAT BERNIE SANDERS got married and stayed married to the same woman all these years, with no scandals.  I know that if he got into the White House we'd never have to worry about him receiving sexual services from an intern while on the phone with VLADIMIR PUTIN or any other world leader.  And it would be sexist of me to think that HILLARY would never, just because she is a woman.

I agree that we must now focus on the candidates who are running for lesser offices than the Presidency - our Senators and Congresspeople and local representatives in City Councils.

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MONGOLIAN WOMEN HAD IT GOOD COMPARED TO MOST MEDIEVAL WOMEN

Pages 169-174  From GENGHIS KHAN  His Conquests  His Empire  His Legacy by Frank McLynn.

The Mongols were polygamous (taking many wives) and polygynous (taking many concubines) but the children of the chief wife were the ones who could be considered for the succession when their father died.

Genghis Khan's troops killed half the population of Hungary in the 1241 era, and one of the Mongol warriors favorite activities was raping the women, often in front of their father or husband.  So what was life like for a MONGOLIAN WOMAN?  Well, it turns out that compared to most medieval women, they had better status.  This didn't mean they weren't treated as chattel, but consider; Genghis OUTLAWED RAPE.  In the past only women were executed for adultery but now both men and women suffered the same punishment, "unless they were rich enough to buy themselves out of the predicament."  Women could also decided if they wanted to be married and divorce became possible for them as it was by mutual consent.  They did not expect a woman to be a virgin when she married and there was no stigma about having children before marriage or divorcing with children or having been married before.  What this means is that if a couple could deal with their differences mutually and peaceably, the consequences were not great.

For the chief and high status men, marriage was not a personal decision so much as a community decision.  Marriage was also considered to be eternal.  Genghis was concerned about inbreeding but his precautions were not always followed. (It's possible that shorter lifespans were a result.)

In their nomadic and hunter-gatherer society, unlike the more European Agricultural societies, women and men performed many of the same or similar jobs, so there wasn't the divide of roles or "men's work," seen elsewhere.  She was kept busy with household and other tasks.  She was expected to know how to drive a large wagon, some with as many as 20 horses.   "One woman would often be expected to drive as many as thirty interconnected wagons,; seven women would often be needed to transport a single oligarch's possessions, for one of these elaborate dwellings, when transported could fill over two hundred wagons; moreover, a single noble with multiple wives might have several such portable palaces." (171)  Sometimes the woman had to figure out how to load the horses - and camels - so that everything was weight distributed.

Wise old women were prized for their wisdom and thought that some women had magical powers.  Women did not have their feet bound as women did in China, nor did they wear clothing that prevented than from moving or seeing freely, such as Person chadors or Arabic burqas.  They could even be regents or the realm or advisors.  So in the 13th century there were many notable Mongol women.  All this upset visitors from the Christian and Muslim faiths, and Buddhism and Confucianism when adopted from China, also reduced the role of women.

Overall, Genghis was considered a very pragmatic man and a genius about human nature.  All the changes he made so that women would have a greater role and more respect than they had before were probably made to make life easier for the entire tribe.

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HUNGARIAN OLYMPIC ATHLETES KATINKA HOSSZZU - ARON SZILAGYI - EMESE SZASZ - FIVE GOLD MEDALS

Fencing: Men's Sabre Individual Aron Szilagyi

Swimming: Women's 200m Individual Medley

Katinka Hosszu

 

Swimming: Women's 100m Backstroke

Katinka Hosszu

 

Swimming: Women's 400m Individual Medley

Katinka Hosszu

 

Fencing: Women's Epee Individual

Emese Szasz

 

****

CELEBRATIONS!

MONGOLIAN INVADERS KILLED HALF THE HUNGARIAN POPULATION - GENGIS KHAN and HIS TROOPS RAPED WOMEN

  After I learned that the Mongolian Invaders had killed half the Hungarian population (or you could say half the population of peoples living in the land known to us as Hungary) I wanted to know more.  I'm one of those people of Hungarian descent who has some Asian features, and I've already wrapped my mind around the probability that some ancestor of mine was raped and that these features have been brought forward though the intermarriage in Hungary of others with a similar genetic heritage. Or could it be instead that these features are not Mongolian, but of the original Magyars?

Author Frank McLynn did a great job of explaining their culture, their world view, their expertise, and their military strategy, blow by blow. But I was distracted and I decided to focus only on the chapter about the Invasion and Devastation in then-Hungary.

Batu and Subedei where the men who closed in on Hungary, then a nation of around 2 million people that went from Transylvanian Alps to modern Croatia, and the Pannanonian Plain was their base for military operations.  This was the era around 1236 - 1242, a time of Crusades, and a time when Hungary had been through a number of rulers, had a relationship with the Vatican which had it's own army, and was thought to have its own impressive and imposing military force, capable of defeating any European country.

However, the Mongols were greatly feared and there were also issues between the Cumans and the Hungarians so they proved not to be the hoped for allies.  Subedei was a genius strategist who decided to use three armies to invade the land and have them all unite at the Danube. His brother Shiban covered the northern area between Poland and Moravia.  Quadan went south-easterly between the eastern Carpathians and the Dniester river, and the main army under Batu went through the Verecke Pass and the upper Tisza Valley. 

There were few good roads in Hungary and the landscape dotted with villages proved to be mostly indefensible.  The Mongols played the game of allowing a troop to think they were gone or had won and then would come back to massacre them.  Notable men including Archbishops and Bishops and those important in the politics and rule of the region also fought in battle and died.  Ethnic Poles and Germans living in Hungary fought too.  The Mongols continued a systematic program of atrocities and exterminating the people.  They also enjoyed mass rape, especially doing so in front of the woman's father or husbands.

Famine and disease, especially the sicknesses transmitted from having so many dead corpses around killed off many more.  The farmers were unable to farm and have crops in for a year after the Mongols left, there was death by starvation.

Infighting within the Mongol Empire was also occurring, as so many troops had left there to fight,  and by 1279 it was divided.  The Golden Horde of China's Quabilai's dominated Russia for another two hundred years.  Chagatai Khanate (a place) in central Asia dominated parts of today's Mongolia, Russia, India, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan.  Then an area that included eastern Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, western Afghanistan, south-western Pakistan and parts of modern Turkmenistan called the (place) Iklhanate.

There seems to have been no time in all this warfare for a nice Mongolian boy to fall in love with a nice Hungarian girl and get married, so there is a very good chance that if you have facial or other bodily characteristics that are most often "Asian," rape is likely the way those characteristics came into the Hungarian (or Polish, Slovak, German, or other ethnic population.)  Either way, if you have Hungarian heritage someone in your lineage survived the carnage, at least long enough to have a child.

Learning that easily half a million to one million were killed by the Mongolians in the mid 13th century Hungary, not so long after the country's founding, I've wondered what impact they had not only on the Hungarian looks but other genetic aspects of our humanity.  Culture is mostly learned, I think.  You could say that I think of ethnicity as having more to do with nurture than nature. 

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FIRES, HELLHOUNDS, and the NEW TOO-HOT REALITY.

We are in a bowl of heat, ash, and fire...

Thousands of acres of forested and scrub hillsides have been burned to the ground, many are still burning.  There have been red skys, blazing suns, ash on roofs and the hoods of cars parked outdoors, ash on the leaves of plants, and smells that would be comforting if only the wood burning was is the fireplace on a cold winter night...

No doubt GLOBAL WARMING has caused the fires.  You know this but here's what happens.  Plant life unable to get enough water to live dies, and so do ecosystems such as insects and creatures that feed on insects.

One morning as I and my neighbors walked our dogs we saw BLOODY PAWPRINTS  and they were HUGE.  Some of us tried to estimate how big the dog had to be and where they started and ended, following them a quarter of a mile on the cement.  The animal had certainly been wounded.  One person said "That has to be a human hand."  Another said, "I think a huge raccoon - look at the nails."  Another determined that it was indeed one paw and that the animal had tried to get into his yard.  We decided that some poor big dog that was let out at night to do it's business might have gotten into a close-by construction site and injured itself.  Someone else thought it had caught a foot in a trap.  As neighbors up and down the street began to speculate, we decided to call these prints - which still exist and prove the injured animal may have been in pain and confused about where to go or what to do next in the middle of the night might be a HELLHOUND. Perhaps if we were living closer to the mountains we might think of this dog as a coyote. 

There are coyotes in Southern California and sometimes you see one from the freeway.  A friend who took in a huge German Shepard stray dog once considered that her female might have mated with one of them. 

When you live up against mountains in Southern California, mountains such as the Santa Monica Chain, or the Sierra Madre, the Angeles Crest Forest,  even if you're in a suburb that's citified, you have to keep watch on your pet dogs and cats and other creatures because a coyote would gladly have your pet for food.  In some of these suburbs there signs up on trees and telephone polls with pictures of these "lost" pets on them and nobody wants to admit it but they probably got eaten.  A bad way for your fluffy loved one to die.

I'm about ready to take some soapy bleach water and a scrub brush to the sidewalks.  The blood smell, though old now, is still attracting pet dogs to sniff and follow.

But if seeing a coyote in neighborhoods up against the mountains, or following the concrete Los Angeles River isn't uncommon, why would such a large creature come all the way to where we live?

The answer is the fires and food.

Fleeing animals taking their chances or simply displaced from their natural surroundings where they are part of a group, have hiding places to sleep, and so on have been ruined.

We see no end, even if it begins to rain because the soil needs to be saturated with water.  However, if it does rain this winter, there will be tremendous wild flower displays in the spring since these always compete for water and space with the larger scrub brush and trees.

Meanwhile, my dog and me have uncharacteristically been running the air-conditioning, but set at 86 degrees indoors.  Since the air has been so polluted that the visibility of the mountains has been cloaked, it has become difficult to breath.  We have both been laying about, me in my thinnest cottons.  I cut her hair back and started giving her water dips to keep her cool.


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BOTONICAL SUNFLOWER