THE 1828 HUNGARIAN PROPERTY TAX CENSUS : HEADS OF HOUSEHOLDS : GENEALOGY TIP #3
It may be difficult to know if the person listed really is your relative. At least with the early United States Census that also only listed the head of household there was a statistical analysis of females, males, and ages. Sometimes you can correlate these Americans head of households to named wife and children in later years. Unfortunately most of the censuses for Hungary were specific to counting Jews, general statistics, or most of the country's documents are not available or missing or lost forever. (I check every few months even when I'm not hot on my personal genealogy and keep hoping that HUNGARY is going to find and release more 1869 census and other information on the HUNGARICANA / NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF HUNGARY website! I read a comment on the site that was negative on the "Mormon" (meaning Latter Day Saints - LDS - FAMILYSEARCH) offerings. It said new documents are received every day!)
TRY THESE:
WIDOWS HELP!
When we see the given and surname of a woman listed as a WIDOW, who is now in possession of the estate due to the death of her husband, we may have her birth name or her married name. Vid. KATALIN LUKACS can be searched for as KATALIN LUKACS. You can find candidates who MARRIED and who are alive in 1828. Vid. KATALIN LUKACSNE is a woman named Katalin who married a man named Lukacs who died. Check deaths of men named Lukacs and see if any of the records mention his bride or widow Katalin. Vid. JANOS LUKACS is a woman who was married to Janos Lukacs. Look for his death record and see what the name of the woman he married is. We focus on 1828 and before. Using this technique, we can possibly recreate the families and make the connections.
IS ANYONE LISTED AS A Junior / Jr. or Senior /Sr.? Though rare, I have noticed this on Latin language records and in my personal genealogy. What this means is that the man is named after his father, and they are BOTH ALIVE. As soon as a Senior dies, there is no longer a Junior, unless he has a son named after him who then becomes the Junior, while he assumes the Senior. (Further research revealed that not only was there a Junior and Senior but that my Junior was the third in a line of men named Istvan.) So, if your ancestor's father is already dead and had the same given name, the Jr. isn't the man you're looking for.
ALL THE PERSONS WITH THAT SURNAME IN THE LOCATION
But mostly what you see are lists of men. So, they are men alive in 1828. If I see that there are 2 productive adults in the household, though it could be a couple people 60 or less, or any variation of householders, I start with an assumption that they are a husband and wife without adult children living with them, just youngsters. I run a search for that head of household's name in BAPTISMAL databases and I subtract 16 years for a birth date for the youngest and 60 years for the oldest - so a birth range of 1768 to 1812. That narrows things a bit, especially if the surname isn't common in that location.
On the BIRTH RECORDS, MARRIAGE RECORDS, and DEATH RECORDS you want to look for notations of their status such as Commune, and profession, or class. These may help you make a connection between a landholder candidate and the census versus a landless peasant. (You may also venture to the 1867 census to see if the same families are still in the location. Though populations did tend to stay put in a location for generations there was movement.)
LISTS of the ENUMERATION ARE NOT ALPHABETICAL - nor are there house numbers.
Pending more research on this, I looked over many lists, and I noticed that people who seemed to have about as much as each other were together. Possibly the census taker might have begun with the richest person in town and gone down from there or maybe it was just the neighborhood, just like now when people who own houses about the same size and worth are in a neighborhood together. Or maybe all the farmers were producing peaches to be sold at market are together. Remembering that these are LANDOWNERS who are potential TAXPAYERS, even seeing 300 or more listed, in a town were house numbers go into the 700's, I'm reminded that there are a lot of people who are workers who own nothing, who are serfs.
WHO DO YOU HAVE DOCUMENTED PERSONS AS ALIVE IN 1828? Following them is probably the most popular tactic.
Here is where your previous research that documents births, marriages, and deaths can be extremely useful. You know who is alive, what the names of the adults are. You know who is widowed. You have a LOCATION and you go to the 1828 for that location, looking for the names. Perhaps this will help you go back in time. More likely it will help enrich your understanding of your ancestor's lives or help you imagine their place in history.
FOUND A SUSPECT - READ MORE ABOUT HIM and HIS ESTATE
At the end pages for each location there are some written paragraphs. Seek through these for more information on the head of household / property owner and what he's up to!
More advice forthcoming!
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