You may start reading around it and realize that borders were also not as solid as they became, that people traveled between countries, especially for business, and that you are seeing some of the same surnames in these various countries.
What spawned this post? I was reading records for Galicia, Poland, and found a note that a priest had written that a certain person near Dukla, Poland, had gone to marry a Hungarian in Zemplen!
As well, you may find that ancestors in your family lines did not necessarily self identify as Hungarian, but German or Ruthenian.
I've noticed that intermarriage happened between people of different ethnicities more often if they were the same religion. Discovering that some of my ancestors were not of the religion I was raised in felt freeing to me.
Years ago I talked on the phone with a man in Buffalo, New York, who I found in an interesting way. I was scanning the internet, playing around, and put in the name of my great great grandmother. Up came an obituary for a woman who lived in Buffalo with the very same name. Not only that, but she wanted any money sent to celebrate her death to the church that my great great grandmother had been baptized in! What if we were related?
I realized that this woman who had just died in America was not my great great grandmother. However, I was excited to learn the name of the church in that town because I'd been reading those records on microfilm off and on for months and there was no mention of the name of the church. Also, when I did not find certain records I was looking for in those church records I read the history. There had been a small chapel there that belonged to a different Christian denomination and Latter Day Saints had no records from that chapel. At the time I wondered if a change in religion had something to do with not being able to find what I needed.
Well, this obituary I was reading also said that the woman had a son in California. Believe it or not, I found his number in the phone book, called him on a land line, he answered, and when I told him the reason for my call, simply gave me his dad's number in Buffalo. He too answered the phone without knowing who was calling.
I had done extensive genealogy on the people with this surname and after he explained that we were NOT related and why, I was able to tell give him information about his siblings and parents from my research. He was so impressed with my knowledge of the town he invited me to go there and visit with him. I wish I had. Live goes on and I lost contact with him.
One of the things he told me is that the people from that town were not very religious. He said that they had changed religions over and over again over the previous hundred or so years, depending on who owned the place. I've heard this before, that when a certain big land owner or person who owned a town converted to be Protestant, it was expected that the people who lived there would to, and back again to Catholic. This person "owned" the place and in a sense the loyalty of the people, kind of like the way your boss owns you.
C 2020 Magyar-American BlogSpot
UPDATE September 2022 You may be interested in my Genealogy Tips. You can use the term Genealogy in the Search feature embedded in this blog to bring up a variety of topics of research interest.
