THE 1828 HUNGARIAN PROPERTY TAX CENSUS : KEYS TO USE - INDEX : 1828 CENSUS TIP #1
My first tip about this census is to use the index which may save you time.
If it were not for a woman named Martha Remer Connor, who created an index for some of the 1828 Census of Hungary, there would be no index for this census at all. Ms. Connor was easing the way for us to look at the original census and you may very well save time using her work.
I spent hours looking for surnames in this census, using my cell phone, and made dozens of bookmarks. When I went back into FAMILYSEARCH using those bookmarks, which usually works, they had ALL reset to the start page of the county, rather than the exact pages I bookmarked. It was distressing. Additionally, though there is a SEARCH feature that appears inside of each volume, it did not function correctly for me, and so I had read hundreds of pages one after another in the first place.
You might have a different experience using it. My advice is to take notes the old fashioned pen-in-hand way.
Ms. Connor did her indexing years ago at the Las Vegas Family History Center owned by the Latter Day Saints. She typed it up. It's readable. The majority of the surnames are correctly spelled. There are a few iffy ones. (i.e. There are fairly standardized spellings for Hungarian surnames by 1828 - to check an iffy surname run it through a translator and see if it has a meaning.) Her volumes were microfilmed for public use. These volumes were a monumental effort on her part (Bless her!) but it's NOT a COMPREHENSIVE LIST of ALL COUNTIES in Hungary in 1828.
Using FAMILYSEARCH, go to Search CATALOG, then search for HUNGARY, and then to CENSUS. Open that. Ms. Connor's work is under that listing.
To start, each volume has a good lists of towns and the typed page number of the original manuscript the town will appear on (which is not the same as the image number). Each volume also has at the beginning sketchy black and white maps of old Counties, an illustration of the ways that various handwritten letters were fashioned depending on language - German script different than Latin.
Most useful of all is an INDEX of surnames by habituation. If you are dealing with a rare surname or a situation where it's clear the people moved from where you've first found them, but you don't know where to, from this might help narrow the locations.
The census COUNTED ONLY PEOPLE WHO OWNED PROPERTY - LAND at each location, people who therefore were expected to pay TAXES. You may be surprised at how few people in a location qualified but also what little it took to be qualified. Basically, if you owned* a house then it was on LAND, so you were a taxpayer.
Although each of the 25 volumes has good information about COUNTY LAND OWNERS, the BOOK OF CITIES is volume 13.
After using the index, you can look at "Vagyonosszeiras 1828" in the FAMILYSEARCH CATALOG. There were over 300 microfilms. The original census books are in the National Archives of Hungary. Each film has a long list of places and the list is alphabetical.
Upcoming - how to read the census 1828!
*On August 3 I changed the word had to owned. However, I'm unsure what the situation was back in the day when it came to home ownership. Were there home loans? I tend to think not. These days we use the word had more loosely to include homeowners as those who still have a mortgage. Those who are RENTING or living on a noble's land as surfs in 1828 will appear on this census but not as LANDOWNERS and are thus not on this INDEX.
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