THE AUSTRIAN-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE : GALICIA : CADASTRAL MAPS : HOUSE NUMBERS : HUNGARIAN GENEALOGY GEN-TIPS SERIES #1

THE AUSTRIAN-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE : GALICIA : CADASTRAL MAPS : HOUSE NUMBERS : HUNGARIAN GENEALOGY GEN-TIPS SERIES #1

This is the start of an expansive series on the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the use of maps....  Stick with me!  There's a lot to learn together.  As with all my other Hungarian Genealogy Tips, the series name is put on each tab so you can pull it all up.

THE AUSTRIAN-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE : GALICIA : CADASTRAL MAPS : HOUSE NUMBERS

INTRODUCTION TO THIS SERIES : Austrian-Hungarian Empire - Gen Tip #1

This icon, from Graphics Fairy, is being used to designate posts for this series.

A WORD ABOUT THE HISTORY OF GALICIA, CADASTRAL MAPS, and HUNGARY.

You say, "What? I thought Magyar-American BlogSpot was all about Hungarian and Hungarian-Americans! Why are we talking about Galicia? Wasn't that in Poland?  

Well... I always advise that a genealogist research the history of the locations that they find their ancestors and use historical records hand in hand with genealogy records. A good part of Poland was part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.

The historical time we are focusing on and that is valuable to Hungarian researchers is when Galicia was a territory that was once owned by the Austrian Crown, and then the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. 

Austrian-Hungarian Empire

Österreichisch-Ungarische Monarchie in GERMAN

Osztrák–Magyar Monarchia in HUNGARIAN means Austrian-Hungarian Monarchy

Here's some historical background:

As a territory under the rule of  the Austrian Crown and then the Austrian-Hungarian empire, Galicia came into being in 1772, in what was called the 'first partition' (of Poland). 

GALICIA was a vast expanse, which is now south-central and south - in what is now Podkarpakie (Subcarpathia) Poland, a tiny bit of what is now Slovakia but was Hungary, and a portion of what is now western Ukraine. (It's not to be confused with the Galicia of Spain though that comes up when you use databases.) The name Galicia is supposed to have come from the word Galizien which was Halychyna in Ukrainian and Halicz in Poland. 

Galicia was already an ethnically diverse area with a Polish and Carpatho-Rusyn (Ruthenian) Slavic settlers, who were mostly Roman Catholic or "Greek" Catholic. (The Greek Catholics were not ethnically Greek but were originally converted to Christianity by Christian missionaries from Greece.) However, though mostly Catholic, there were Protestants such as Lutheran Germans.

As time went on, Galicia was a good place to settle for Jews, and the Jews who came in included some Sephardic roots Jews, who had left after being exited from Spain and Portugal, as well as the Ashkenazi 'German' Jews and Russian Jews. Over time, there came to be a became significant Jewish population, mostly merchants. 

There were other immigrations of ethnic Germans into what was Hungary, but now this wave of immigration brought them in from Austria. We find the presence of Germanic surnames in Catholic records and Germans marrying Poles. These Austrian-Germans were often also nobles, administrators, and those in a higher status than the traditionally agricultural "peasants' or the men and women who earned their living through making shoes or other useful items that took skill, craft, and artistry. 

We also find Hungarian surnames in Galicia and Polish names in Hungary.

l find that the nobility was intermarrying with nobility of other ethnicities for some time - going the distance to make a good marriage - so today there is some confusion or controversy over who was a Slovak, Polish, Ruthenian, Lithuanian, or Hungarian noble. (And some nobles were also at least partly Italian, Czech, or another ethnicity.) 

One thing you should consider is that a surname might have been changed to be more Polish, more Hungarian, more German - especially note the endings: ski, sky, skyi, szke...

Through time, there were very many incursions, raids, battles and wars fought in Galicia and for it before the Nazi's. This included the Mongols and the Tatars - who took men, women, and children into slavery and marched them into the Ottoman Empire of Turkey. It also included the Swedes, and - contrary to the thought that Poland and Hungary were "always friends"  Ferenc Rakoczi II, Prince of Transylvania, and his army also came into the Podkarpakie area, devastating towns. There were also the Russians coming into Galicia, who are now in war to take Ukraine, as Russia thinks of Ukraine as a historical part of Russia.

On old maps of GALICIA you see the Carpathian mountain range is to the south, running through what is today SLOVAKIA, but was then HUNGARY. The main trade route is from southern "trade route" towns such as Dukla, Poland, through the Dukla Pass around Cergowa, Poland, and into Hungary. Once the whole region was especially significant in the wine business with travel through the Pass into the Hungarian grape growing and wine making region. Some of the Galician market towns had wine cellars for the storage of wine brought up from Hungarian wine country. There was significant trade between Hungary and Galicia of other items as well. This meant that people who identified as Hungarian and people who identified as Polish or another ethnicity were meeting up.

So valuable was this road  through the mountains called the Dukla Pass, because it was the pass with the lowest elevation, the easiest to travel, that many thousands died in World War II trying to control it. As the intention to murder the Jews in Poland became clear, many fled Galicia and came into Hungary. As well, the Carpatho-Rusyn (Ruthenians) were also forced to move by the occupying Germans to other areas than their traditional homeland, dispersing them throughout Poland. Since their homeland included places in Hungary (now Slovakia) some fled there - moving south - rather than be moved around Poland.

Regarding World War II, the Nazi's won. They used the Dukla Pass route to invade Hungary, as one of two major routes into the country. Stories were that one day the people were in the fields and markets and the next they were - gone.

It's a difficult history.

Continue on with this series ....  

All posts in this series have the tab Austrian-Hungarian Empire - Gen Tips

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GLASS WALL FILM - FILM NOIR : MAGYAR AMERICAN FILM REVIEW

NOIR OF THE WEEK - THE GLASS WALL

  I watched the film on this DVD.

 Here is a promotional poster for the 1953 film.

The film THE GLASS WALL is about a Hungarian-Jew, a Holocaust survivor who makes it to New York but is about to be sent back to Europe by Immigration.  He pleas his case that he had befriended an American, a musician who plays somewhere in Times Square.  His only hope is that he find this musician, who by now has a serious girlfriend who is helping him find a better job so that they can afford to mar, so that the man can testify for him. So Vincent, this man, runs for his life and is homeless on the streets of New York but finds himself befriended by a Blonde who steals a coat to pawn so she won't get evicted, as well as a Hungarian immigrant and her daughter, who help him.

Enter GOULASH on film.  Goulash is a healing meal.  And as mama and daughter cook it and serve it up, no one asks if it's Kosher.

This film is one of those that got the Go at a studio where there was concern for the plight of WWII Jewish immigrants who sometimes found themselves without a country, their families dead, their home towns decimated, who traveled to the United States, as well as how their country men and women in the United States had empathy and tried to help them within their means.  It presents Hungarian ethnic immigrants to the American Viewer sympathetically.

In the end the musician is found and the Holocaust survivor finds himself on the Right side of immigration and accepted by his new country.

Worth a watch, especially if you like Film Noir.

C 2015 All Rights Reserved  Magyar-American BlogSpot

HUNGARIAN WOMEN : SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS : JEWISH WOMEN AND RECORDS : GENEALOGY TIP #4

HUNGARIAN WOMEN : SPECIAL CONSIDERATIONS : JEWISH WOMEN AND RECORDS  : GENEALOGY TIP #4

Think Jewish women and you think of THE MATCHMAKER!

Some years ago I met some people who are working on going through church records to extract Jewish individuals for the use of the website JEWISHGEN. One of them told me that while going through CHURCH records he had to start all over because he had been listing anyone with a Jewish sounding name and didn't realize that some Christians used Old Testament names for their children. (And some people also do not know that "Jewish" surnames in common use (rather than religious use) are often simply names used by Christians also. This was true in Hungary.)

You don't have to be Jewish to find  the website Jewishgen useful. I have an account with them which I use from time to time when I'm helping someone else with their genealogy or if I want town information, location, the various names the place has gone through depending on what nation was ruling it (German names, Slovak names, Polish names), or to see POSTCARDS of the towns. It can be interesting to find out what happened in that town during World War II or the Holocaust. You might interview your Hungarian great-grandmother and ask her what she experienced or witnessed while living in Holocaust era Europe.  Remember that there were some Gentiles who aided Jews in hiding or leaving the country and you might want to run the names and the towns through a web site like Yad Vashem.  (The link is one my sidebar.)  A Yiskor Book is a book that remembers the Jews who died from a town in the Holocaust.  Some of these books are on the Internet, some in translation, some not, and were originally composed by listing people the living remembered.  They may not be comprehensive.

I want to make a mention of Jewish Women in Jewish church or temple records.  In eastern and central Europe a physical church was often the largest, best built, you could say safest place to store records and the priests were sometimes the only educated person who could read or write for miles.  So if there were just a few families that were Jewish who had to travel to their own congregation, the priest recorded their children's births with a note that they were Jewish.  As previously mentioned, finding people listed in Catholic or other Christian church records does not mean they actually attended the church, unless you find it is a mixed marriage or see a record of the baptism of a child. Notice if a birth is recorded without a note of baptism following.

In the previously mentioned 300 years of one small town Catholic church record that I read I found one marriage of a Jewish man and Catholic woman.  They were married in the church and their children were baptized and raised Catholic.  (Kind of like Ms. Charlotte Casiraghi of Monaco and her child with a Jewish comedian, Gad Elmaleh,  Raphael, who was recently Baptised there.)

The idea that a marriage should occur in the bride's church no matter what the religion of the groom here in America or that in Catholic marriage the parents must agree to raise their children Catholic in order to be married in the church doesn't always hold up in the old European records I've seen.

Larger Jewish settlements, places were the Jewish people had their own congregations usually had their own ledgers and records.  I have read these temple ledgers and have discovered that there is a significant difference from contemporary Catholic and Christian church records.  AND THAT IS THAT I FOUND THAT THE MOTHER'S NAME WAS ALWAYS RECORDED and not only that but the name of the midwife and the name of the person who circumcises the baby boy!   This is no doubt because of the belief that a child wasn't Jewish without having a Jewish woman for a mother.

Settlements tended to be about 5 miles from each other, depending on the geographical considerations.  This meant that a person could walk to the next town along a road or using horse or horse and buggy get there in a half day or less of travel.  People knew people and matchmaking was done by friends, families, priests and rabbi's; usually the marrying couple lived not too far from each other.  In Hungarian small towns there seems to be a lot of what I call "childhood sweetheart marriages" among boys and girls who always knew each other and then grew up.  But by the 1900's some boys and girls grew up and didn't obey their parents when it came time to marry.  Love Matches were taking hold.

If you take a good look at old maps or even new ones you'll see a plethora of small settlements and towns listed throughout Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, really all over Europe.

While one person I was in contact with told me his Yeshiva boy grand father would have never associated with the non-Jews in their Polish market town (at the time near the Slovak border) but research the era, the time and the place, especially where there was trade, big markets, and you may find that Jews and Gentiles enjoyed chatting with each other, were doing business, and were not so isolated or offish with each other as all that.

I recently found this site!  HUNGARIAN JEWISH ROOTS

December 2023 link update http://www.jewishroots.hu/en_generalgenealogy_1.html

To bring up other posts from this series click on the label Pro Tips-Hungary Women

2014-2025 Magyar American BlogSpot  All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights.

BOOK EXCERPT: REZSO KASZTNER : THE DARING RESCUE OF HUNGARIAN JEWS by LADISLAUS LOB

REZSO KASZTNER
The Daring Rescue of Hungarian Jews : A Survivor's Account
by Ladislaus Lob C 2008
Pimlico is the Publisher

pages 269-270

"The charge that Kasztner made up the Bergen-Belsen group entirely of his relatives and his Zionist cronies from Kolozsvar also stands on shaky ground. Given the appalling task of selecting a few hundred from hundreds of thousands, no selection could have been "right."

(My note : his relatives were a count of ten, while other relatives were left behind and exported or murdered in Auschwitz.)

"The dominance of Ziolnists from Kolozsvar is hardly surprising, since Kolozsvar was Hungary's second largest city with the largest and most active Zionist community, and the whole rescue enterprise was founded on Palestine immigration certificates...

"My father and I were only two of many non-Zionists, and the point is strongly made by Peretz Revesz, a former leading member of the youth movement who carried out many dangerous rescue missions of his own in Slovakia and Hungary with Kasztner's help."

page 279

"One of the most impressive witnesses was Israel Szabo. He explained that "the ordinary Hungarian in the street knew about Auschwitz" but "mass flight" was impossible, and believing that the Hungarian Jews could have "organized any resistance" would have been a "fatal error." They had been methodically worn down by the "expropriation of their wealth, the loss of their place of work, ... the closure inside their homes, in the ghetto under inhuman conditions."

This process had left them drained of all confidence and energy.

HUNGARIANS ARE ALL GERMANS : STEREOTYPES OF HUNGARIANS / HUNGARIAN AMERICANS

 

Is anyone a "pure" or "unmixed" Hungarian?

I'm not going to indulge in anything close to Nazism here. I'm not looking to eliminate anyone who identifies as Hungarian as not because over generations their Hungarians have mixed with Germans, Slovaks, Ruthenians, or Jews, or anyone in particular.

When it comes to stereotypes of Hungarians though, it seems that this "truism" is often repeated. Sometimes when I hear it coming out of someone's mouth I get the feeling they are being DISMISSIVE of a unique culture, that they even have forgiveness for Hungarians because "really" they are Germans.

Have you had this experience?


(Run the word "stereotype" through the search feature on this Google Blogger to bring up OTHER STEREOTYPES.)

C 2012 Magyar-American BlogSpot

BOOK EXCERPT : REZSO KASZTNER by LADISLAUS LOB

REZSO KASZTNER
The Daring Rescue of Hungarian Jews" A Survivor's Account
by Ladislaus Lob C 2008
Pimlico is the Publisher
page 266

"Nor were the Jews of Hungary as unaware of the danger as Kasztner's enemies assert. Some were misled by soothing lies. Others did not want to know the truth. They believed, or tried to make themselves believe, that such horrors might happen elsewhere, but not in Hungary: the Hungarians would reward the Jews for their loyalty or realize that by harming the Jews they would be harming their own economy and culture. However, by the time of the German occupation the majority of Hungarian Jews had some idea of the massacres in the east, thanks to reports by refugees or Zionists activists.


"Even though as a young child I did not understand what people in Budapest were fretting, speculating, arguing and agonizing about, I could tell that it was a matter of life and death..."

BOOK EXCERPT : REZSO KASZTNER by LADISLAUS LOB

page 264


His world was "totally shattered..."For years, his activity in Budapest had been a source of pride to him", but now he needed "almost superhuman stores of strength, simply to get up in the morning, go out of the house and walk about the city streets as if nothing had happened."  Deeply hurt by the "badge of shame" that had been attached tio him, he remained "convinced that he was the victim of an unbearable injustice.  (Quoting another writer Weitz)


"Kasztner was not the only one to suffer.  His wife and daughter were also hounded by the rabble.  Their block of flats was daubed with graffiti saying "Kasztner is a murderer" and worse.  Their balcony was bombarded with rubbish.  Neighbours called Bogyo a "Nazi" and shopkeepers refused to serve her.  Szuzsi, form the gage of nine, was harassed, bullied and called a "murderess" at school and in the street.  The witch hunt was to continue for many years, and the lasting  emotional damaged caused to both women is easy to imagine...(The twi women are his wife and daughter.)"


.... "He was hounded by death threats, which the authorities took seriously enough to assign him two bodyguards, though ironically these were withdrawn shortly before he really needed them.  On the other hand, he receive many letters of support, particularly from member of the young pioneer groups who had worked with him in Budapest.  He was offered sanctuary in two kibbutzim, but refused to hide..."

BOOK EXCERPT : REZSO KASZTNER by LADISLAUS LOB

REZSO KASZTNER
The Daring Rescue of Hungarian Jews" A Survivor's Account
by Ladislaus Lob  C 2008
Pimlico  is the Publisher

(The subject of this book Rezso Kasztner is a controversial figure of the Holocaust/ World War II. Some, including the author who provides his own testimony "I am alive today because of Rezso Kasztner", see him as a hero, someone who found a way to get some Hungarian Jews to Switzerland though this was through  financial deals with Nazis.  Others in Israel felt just the opposite, that he could have done more, and he was killed because of it.)

page 196-197

"...a miracle seemed to have happened.  From the Red Cross in Geneva we received some 60 cases containing food, medicines, vitamins, and in particular 1,300 boxes of a product called "Starkosan."  This was a chocolate powder with added vitamins and nutrients.  I have never forgotten the please of stuffing myself with it..."

FROM HIS DIARY:

"For the first time in five months a cultured flavour: chocolate!  Old people and children are truly becoming drunk on it; they are eating it with spoons, dry, on bread, with butter, with water, with jam, mixed with glucose, etc.  There has been a change in people.  Cheerful, calm faces, chattiness, an optimistic mood...."