You're excited to learn, using the immigration/ ship records/ or Naturalization records in the United States or the World War I draft registration of your ancestor, the name of a village or town in the Old Country they left or were born in. Then you find the Baptismal Record for your great grandpa that agrees with what it says on his U.S. military - draft registration, his Social Security Application, his Death Certificate. (That's proofing!) So you become knowledgeable about that town and place in the Old Country and may hope someday to travel there. Pretty soon you keep isolating or "refining" your searches on databases and otherwise for more ancestors to that place, say Szatmar County, and darn, nothing much is coming up.
You expand out County after County and pretty soon you're learning the Old German or the New Slovak names for settlements in Lipto. There is entirely too much information, too much too sort through, but you lose track of time while you research.
If you're lucky, using a database you'll find the same family before they moved to the location you started with. Some couples and some births make sense -agreeing with other documents. Again, without DEATH RECORDS and MARRIAGE (and REMARRIAGE) RECORDS, it may be impossible to proof your research and proof you must. Scan using the parent's names and see what comes up and let that lead you to the images of the microfilms. MARRIAGE and DEATH RECORDS are necessary to proof.
If database use is bringing up TOO MUCH INFORMATION, consider looking at a map of Hungary as it existed before 1920 and look at the counties. Also look at old maps for old roads and village locations. (It's easier to go around a mountain on a road than cross it by foot. And the railroads improved transportation and greatly influenced which towns prospered.)
Some of the old counties such as ZEMPLEN are now much in SLOVAKIA and many previously Hungarian counties are in ROMANIA now. The FAMILYSEARCH DATABASE does recognize that Hungarian researchers may find themselves in Slovakia and visa versa but that doesn't mean you won't need to go to records in "CZECHOSLOVAKIA", AUSTRIA, POLAND, YUGOSLAVIA, SERBIA, CROATIA, or ROMANIA or UKRAINE.
Be it the United States or another country, try not to get map bound. This is especially the case if the place someone lived is NEAR A BORDER. Consider that a person could have lived their whole life in one place but left to live elsewhere in old age (perhaps in with a child who would care for them - in the case of Hungary this was usually a DAUGHTER - and may be buried elsewhere, such as a family graveyard in another county, or the less expensive cemetery in the next county.
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This post was slightly edited on August 13, 2019
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