This video presents postcards of Hungarian Lipto County, which is now Liptov, Slovakia, but still has a Hungarian majority. Beautiful mountains and interesting architecture! Part of many a Hungarian-American's heritage. The poster, Sicambria, has some other videos up that are also interesting.
That said, for hundreds of years people of various ethnic backgrounds, Slovaks, Germans, and others, lived in this area, and many intermarried. Religious differences payed out too. The Germans were mostly Catholics and many but not all were from Southern Germany. Some of the Slovaks were Greek Catholic, as were the Carpathian Rus (Also called Rusyns) and Ukrainians.
There are controversies over the nobility and who was or was not of original Hungarian ancestry or really Slovak or Czech.
Most Americans who are "2nd" or "3rd" generations since immigration here are mixed heritage. I know someone who is 3rd generation on one side and 4th on the other who has claim to 16 different European ethnicities! (What fun her genealogy searches could be!)
So I tend to think people are the ethnicity they feel themselves to be, that they feel they can relate to and feel comfortable with. And of course, our surnames tell the world about one of our ethnicities and it is from our surnames that other people assume what our ethnic identity is.
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