While MAGYAR AMERICAN focuses on Hungarian culture and society, we can learn a lot from research in Poland, Slovakia, and other parts of what was the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.
Hungary and Poland have history together - both good and bad. Rakoczi's armys destroyed towns in southern Poland, for instance.
I mentioned before, here at MAGYAR-AMERICAN BlogSpot about finding some Hungarian surnames in church records for Galicia - Poland, and a notation in a marriage record in a Roman Catholic church that the bride came from Hungary. That was a small town involved in the wine business. I suspect this would be more true in records for cities, such as Krakow.
I think you'll find that people with means would travel far for marriages. They were also more likely to marry in the more impressive churches and cathedrals. And if you "know" that a certain noble ancestor lived in a place but their marriages and other records seem to be missing consider the larger church or cathedral not too far away.
Although it was an extremely small sample, I recently ran the names of the known nobility who owned a particular area of Galicia just a few miles from the then-Hungarian border in the GENETEKA databases and none of their names came up. So what was happening? First, some of the churches, while incredibly beautiful and ornate inside, didn't seat too many people. So if you were having many guests to your religious ceremony, you needed more space. But then, you probably needed more space for the festivities as well, and somewhere for guests who traveled to stay for a few days. Also, you might have a private chapel or church on your own property and having services there would protect you and your guests from the villagers intent on witnessing the goings-on and invading your privacy. However, this also means that they kept private records of their births and marriages if those names are also not coming up as recorded in any of the dozens of church books now transcribed for the Geneteka databases. Today I would think that such records would make their way to the diocese archive but back in the day? Common people were keeping records of births and marriages and deaths handwritten in their Bible...
In January 2022 I did a series called Pro Genealogy Tips - Galicia which you can reference.
You might want to run some Hungarian surnames in the databases of other European countries as well.
Some of the noble families donated their private records to The National Archives in Hungary.
All posts in this series have the tab Austrian-Hungarian Empire - Gen Tips
C 2024 Magyar American BlogSpot - All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights
