My genealogy research experience shows that NAMING children, giving them a name also called a "given name" is very tied in with class and status in those pre-immigration Hungarian and Slovak -held records.
Yet one cannot assume that someone with a common name was considered to be a commoner. The father's status or profession is on those BAPTISMAL Records. If the mother was born a noble but the father is not, it will say so. This will be in evidence the further back from 1848/1849 you go and persists in many records forward of 1848/1849. On some records of the 1820's and before, there will be a record of status rather than profession i.e Nobilis, Subinquillis, etc. which can link you to that Urbarium 1767.
For the average Hungarian - the farmers and craftsman and merchants and tradespeople - there seems to have been limited number of given names to use when naming the new baby. I've read that parents who experienced (and almost expected) that some of their children were going to die before ever reaching adulthood, the repetition of names was about the hope for a replacement child for the one who died. I think there was more tradition behind naming children.
For the high noble you will see the naming gets more exotic or original and it seems like the more names, the higher the status. For the average Hungarian you have Janos (John), Andras (Andrew), Istvan (Steven), Maria (Mary), Erszebet (Elizabeth), Anna (Ann). If you find an Apollonia well, I've seen the name along with "illegitimate" recorded several times, but have also seen the name in centuries old genealogy charts.
As far as an honorific name, it's usually that the first son will be named after a father, the first daughter named after the mother. However, the naming continues on predictably from there. The first son named Janos dies, the next son born will be given the name Janos. Ditto the first child named Maria, and so on. If you notice the same couple reusing a name that's a clue that you should look for the DEATH RECORD of the first children so named who died.
Every once in a while I will see a Latinate mention that the son is a "Junior." This generally means the father with the same name is still alive. As soon as he dies, Junior is no longer a Junior. If he has also named a son with his name, he is then the Senior and the younger is the Junior.
In Hungary two brothers who were born of different mothers - who were close - were called "brothers of a different mother." Egy masik anya testverei.
The commoner given names and order of names given are so repetitive I tend to think of them as Number One Son, Number Two Son, Number Three Son. Families that manage to have many children who survive into adulthood will start using more names but still, these names seem to be from the standard list. Zsuzsanna and Julianna and Rozalia may indicate that this child is a much younger daughter. But when you go into the records of wealthier, noble, you could say more worldly people, people who travel more, you find more diversity of given names, and a greater number of names for a child. Some of these names recall the Ancient Romans. Gyula (Julius) for an example, or Old Testament Bible characters (Ezekiel as an example.)
The Germanic influence is that children be given more than one name from birth, usually two. This is a pattern that has become All American as well. Additionally, it's Germanic that a child might go through life being called by their middle or other name.
(The Ruthenians, also known as Carpathian Rusyn, have their own honorific naming pattern. A naming pattern can indicate an ethnicity.)
I notice that some Hungarian immigrants to the United States continued the Hungarian naming pattern. Others used the first original names in the family in hundreds of years for their American born!
After seeing so many single names on BAPTISMAL records, be careful when you see two names that you are not assuming it's one child with a first and middle name. Two sets of godparents are a clue if the priest has not written in a word for twins such as gemelli. (I found an indexed record for twin sisters that FAMILYSEARCH indexing has listed as one girl baby with two names.)
On occasion I see that the priest has written in that the child was "premature" and sometimes a death cross and date is on the record. Premature sometimes is included because the child was born close to the marriage date. Or the child was baptized by a midwife or someone else. Recently, one in which it was explained that a twin was born dead but the obstetrician baptized them both. That means the couple had means to have a doctor there at the birth which is unusual. Baba means midwife in Hungarian. Szulesz means obstetrician. Orvos means doctor.
Note that the BIRTH DATE is most often 2-3 days before the BAPTISMAL date in Hungarian records, but the baptismal could have been weeks or months after the birth. Sometimes a birth and baptismal date that is the same indicates the child was baptized right away because it was sickly or premature. Sometimes it was baptized the same day of birth because the priest made home visits or the chapel was down the street. Family members also baptized infants. The sacrament of Baptism was very important to Christians of every variety in the Old Country.
That the record is a "church record" does not mean the child was baptized in the building of the church. At a couple days old the parents might take the child over to the church.
Sometimes a family with means would take a child to the next town where the church was more impressive, the seat of the diocese, or simply had a larger seating capacity, and have a baptism there rather than their village church. Doing so was probably a little closer to our idea of Baptism today rather than the simple ceremony in a small village church or chapel.
Illegitimacy: If the record says the child is illegitimate but the a father's name appears this means that he has acknowledged he's the father. It's rare. Look for him in the records: The couple may be engaged and appear in marriage records later. He may just be a married man. (At the time the father's acknowledgement implied financial support and could also imply the child will have an inheritance.)
If there is no name - unknown father - well, as I have read about this - probably everyone in town knows who the father is - knows who has been meeting in the barn - or who has even raped a woman - the priest even knows - but cannot write that down.
Legitimacy was tied in with inheritance rights. It was a legal status and very important in a class conscious society. That the priest cannot change, no matter what his wisdom, belief, or feelings about a situation.
Other notations I've seen about illegitimacy include a priest writing in that the girl - the mother - is a SERVANT. I hate it but back in the day servant girls becoming pregnant by their employer or another man living in the house she worked in or around the farm were not uncommon. Sexual harassment in employment is not new. A servant girl was usually a young, innocent girl, an orphan or from a poor family. She had no defenders. She may have no inheritance coming - no dowry. Expectations that a poor girl would not resist the noble also came into play. The fact that people with small houses could have servants who lived in and slept across the room from the family and did not provide a separate room with a lock and key also meant unmarried sex.
Affairs: I came across one child marked illegitimate in which the GODPARENTS were a couple nobles : there's a story there. Also came across the mother of an illegitimate child who came from a rather noble family herself. More story. In wonderment I also located a noble woman who had seven illegitimate children! Since they survived and seemed to have the usual spacing of a couple years apart (breastfeeding can prevent conception!) I call her "Someone's Mistress!" Unlike the abandoned prostitute or sexually harassed and raped maid whose children usually died of starvation at a higher rate than usual (such suffering!) this woman was likely being supported by a man with another legitimate family, a noble, or baron.
I have to wonder if the father was the Godfather and the Godmother knew it.
How many Godfathers were actually fathers and how many Godmother's knew it?
Did you know that the Old Country Hungarians sometimes had duels?
I think we all have notions that pre sexual revolution 1960's in the U.S. people were rather prim and proper and would not have sex unless married. But as I see illegitimate births on old records into the 1700's I ask WHY then? Little to no good contraception has something to do with it.
A consequence of DNA tests versus good old fashioned genealogy is that affairs and rapes are revealed.
One academic paper I read said that the better the times economically the more illegitimate children, the more children in general. Good crops, a good year for wine, more play! (I have to smile. I would rather these ancestors had moments of wild abandon than be unwilling participants of sex.)
In the church records I also see a lot of babies born to single women in the very late 1800's where the priest has written illegitimate "Father is in America." I imagine the promises made to wait and be sent for. As you Magyar-Americans probably know, the streets here were not paved in gold after all. Our ancestors were a hard working people. Some of the men came to the United States to work in factories and then went back to Hungary to work in the fields for the summer. Some immigrant men - not just Hungarians - left their past behind including women they married - and started new families or were so ashamed of being unable to send money back that they disappeared.
In my own genealogy, I have an ancestor widower who married a pregnant noble woman who had been widowed during pregnancy. She was Lutheran. He Catholic. She is listed as Lutheran throughout her pregnancies thereafter. I wonder if they were having an affair before marriage or if he simply stepped up to be the father and man of the house to a pregnant woman. If a person didn't join the priesthood, the nunnery, the monastery and vow to celibacy, then they were married - and married - and married. One paper I read said that three marriages was the official limit! (Let me know if you have evidence of someone who married more!)
Mention that the child is an orphan: I've seen this on MARRIAGE RECORDS. In the 19th century though in Europe, an orphan was a child without a father - no one to support it - and that was part of the mentality that a child was owned by the father. However, if you see that someone is listed as an orphan, look for the deaths of both parents as it seems our more modern definition of an orphan as having no parents alive prevailed. Sometimes a remarriage of a parent is more subtle. One marriage record (circa 1802) says that Maria is the daughter of a man surname Sikora but throughout the other records her maiden surname is Simko. I'm seeking the death record of her birth father to proof this and a remarriage record for her mother. Sometimes if an unmarried mother died in childbirth or soon after the child is mentioned as an orphan on the BAPTISMAL record. We need to take the 19th century notion of an orphan into consideration and find the death records of the parents.
You may come across terminology such as FOUNDLING or BASTARD. My recent reading about illegitimacy in the 19th century and prior to this has clarified some things for me.
A FOUNDLING was not necessarily also illegitimate and didn't have the same stigma. This was a child who was put out because the living parent(s) were too poor to care for it. A foundling might be placed in an orphanage run by a convent. The infant didn't necessarily have to be exposed to the elements. On the church steps would do. The idea was that the parents hoped someone would find it and keep it.
I once read about a hospital in 19th century Paris that actually had anonymous infant drop off, sort of like our Legal Surrender Program in California. There was something like a revolving door on the outside of the hospital where a baby could be placed. Here in California, a desperate mother who cannot care for her child can walk into a fire station and drop it off and will not be prosecuted, unlike those who do throw a baby in a dumpster or on a roadside. Moses of the Bible was a Foundling.
No doubt about it, an illegitimate child had status only higher than a slave. Illegitimate children tended to 1) also have illegitimate children 2) die at twice the rate as children born into a marriage, usually because the mother was too poor and alone in the world to feed it or had been abandoned or disowned by her family - so sad! 3) marry each other since they had the same status.
As a result of giving into wild abandon or being seduced and abandoned or raped and left devastated, a woman who had a child without a husband to support it lost her status. Her options for marriage were not so good. People who did not follow the custom of marriage first were suspected of being irresponsible because they had not thought of how they would keep their own offspring alive. I suspect that this may account for some noble women who had a child without a husband being married by commoners. As I understand it, and I suspect this may have depended on exactly when or where it happened, a woman who was born noble but married a commoner did not confer her status on her children. (But a father with no sons could give his daughter or daughters an inheritance.)
A bastard was defined as a child whose parents were not married at the time. We now say illegitimate, if we say it at all, to mean any child whose parents are not married to each other, whatever their marital status is. The priests tended to use "unknown father" rather than get into the details, but I've heard that some other researchers have found notes such as "child of the saddle" (!?!?!) Actually that terminology indicates that the father passed through town as a soldier or other man on horseback - a traveler.
A child who was born a bastard or illegitimate as their legal status could become legitimate and able to inherit through the marriage of its parents later. Or, if the father had no other MALE HEIRS, he could chose to legally admit to his fathering, recognize the son as his own, and then the son could inherit.
When you look through nobility records you sometimes see that someone - with a rather common name - is also ALIAS another name. (In some texts another term is used such as mask.) This is usually meant to discern that a certain person HAS OTHER (often noble) FAMILY HERITAGE and is PART OF THAT OTHER FAMILY too or that they are part of a CLAN of names (who can also share crests or shields). An alias or mask can also indicate that an adoption took place. Use of two surnames, one alias, happened also because of inheritance. The male line died out and a son in law or other relative inherited and thus carried both names.
One time I found a marriage record in Gonc-Ruska, Abauj County, Hungary that had an amazing notation. The bride was of noble birth - an incredibly prestigious name, but an ORPHAN. The translation, of the notes the priest made on the marriage record, said she and her groom were given a special dispensation to marry. Clearly this girl was marrying the brother - not blood - that she was raised with. The dispensation was not that they were raised together. It was that she was a noble and he was not, but, it said "the boy is a Knight!" I've wondered if that meant he was a Knight in Shining Armor to marry her or if this means his family was from the lower nobility while her surname indicates one of the highest nobility. You ask yourself "Why would that be any of the business of the Church?" Yet it was, because of the legalities implied by marriage, for the priest to make a notation that would support inheritance rights.
And I'm always reminded that we take for granted the progress of medical science, our personal cleanliness and that of the water we drink, the vaccines that are so effective because plague and other illnesses, not understood, were equal opportunity diseases, effecting all classes of people. We no longer think of these diseases as curses or think of people who had the ability to heal as witches.
I recently came across a record that on the marriage said something like "Janos Lakatos, son of Andras Toth and Maria Klein," clearly indicating that Janos had a different father than Andras Toth. Worth checking in a case like this is a previous marriage for Maria, and the death of the birth father.
A 20 year old man died with his parents already recently dead and so was marked on his DEATH RECORD that he died as an orphan.
On one marriage record the Latin orphanus was included perhaps to explain that no family showed up from the bride's side.
As adoptions go, I believe these were generally informal, not requiring legal paperwork among commoners. A child would simply go live in with a family willing to take it in. Sometimes this was the Godparents, an uncle or aunt, sister or brother. Sometimes the informally adopting parents had enough love and food and sometimes they had a farm and worked the child. Children typically started working around the age of 10 around the house and farm. They were treated much more like adults when they became 13. 13 was the age of manhood or womanhood. And so in medieval times and among those who didn't have to work for an income, 14 year old girls were betrothed, arranged to be married. Often their grooms were about the same age or a little older, sometimes much older. (That said, consummation was not always immediate and could wait until a ceremony. The families hoped the couple would naturally take to each other. While the older bride and groom were offered a time to be alone during their ceremony for this purpose.)
To my amazement. I just found a church record for a village in what is now Slovakia in which the priest wrote out a whole paragraph about how the couple HAD LIVED TOGETHER WITHOUT MARRIAGE FOR FIVE YEARS on the marriage record and so their child was now legitimate! I noted that the husband's rank was higher than the wife's. I can just imagine a scenario in which his family objects to the match and the couple agree to go against all morality and religion and live together to prove they are compatible. Maybe they waited till his parents died and he got his inheritance.
To read more about fertility and illegitimacy in Hungary read Ference Ajus' work called Illegitimacy in Hungary 1880-1910 which is available as a PDF download.
Try this link CITESEERX-PSU-EDU Ference Ajus Hungary
C 2019 Magyar-American BlogSpot
All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
This post is part of a series.
To bring up all posts in the series, click on the tag Pro tips: FamilySearch for Hungarian Genealogy,
