THE AUSTRIAN-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE : GALICIA : CADASTRAL MAPS : HOUSE NUMBERS : GENEALOGY GEN-TIPS SERIES #6

THE AUSTRIAN-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE : GALICIA : CADASTRAL MAPS : HOUSE NUMBERS : GENEALOGY GEN-TIPS SERIES #6

Austrian-Hungarian Empire

Österreichisch-Ungarische Monarchie in GERMAN

Osztrák–Magyar Monarchia in HUNGARIAN (Austro-Hungarian Monarchy)

Maps for the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, which includes Galicia, now Southern Poland, as well as today's Slovakia, part of today's Ukraine including Cadastral maps (or in America Plat maps) will be in GERMAN, LATIN, Hungarian, or other languages...

Just as today there are SLOVAK names for previously HUNGARIAN NAMED settlements, some settlements were renamed in GERMAN.

Here are some links to what is sometimes called Village Finders.

JEWISH GEN START PAGE  Seek the GAZETTEER

But let's return to the LIBRARY OF CONGRESS LIBRARY OF CONGRESS : MAPS and GAZETTEER ADVISEMENT AUSTRIAN HUNGARIAN EMPIRE

Excerpt: We are equally fortunate in possessing a comprehensive gazetteer to search for place names in the former Austria-Hungary, and that is Josef and Karl Kendler's 1905 work title ORTS-UND VERKEHRS-LEXIKON VON OESTERREICH-UNGARN.   .... To our benefit the Kendler gazetteer has been digitalized in its entirety for research VIA THE LIBRARY's WEBSITE .... A major drawback of the gazetteer, however, is its absence of geographic coordinates, which can be remedied by using the online Jewishgen Gazetteer or some other published gazetteer.  

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

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HUNGARIAN SURNAMES and GIVEN NAMES and JEWISHNESS : GENEALOGY

I was researching a woman noble named Judit Thuranszky de Turik et Komjathna and some other historical persons who are probably linked in some way to this area and who I have reason to think may have been Jewish, at least hundreds of years ago.  Perhaps it's that I once spent hundreds of hours reading 200 years plus of one particular Catholic church records of marriages and found one person - a man who was the town pharmacist - who was listed as Jewish.  Perhaps it's because I know that in Hungary people who were living on the land of a noble who became Lutheran or Reformed  or Evangelical, or some other religion, tended to feel the pressure to follow there - and back during the Counter Reformation.  Perhaps it's because that the Moslem Ottoman empire was in place for so long in the territory that is Hungary that basically, I think of Hungary as a place where there has been a lot of religious upheaval. Or that as a genealogist I'm often hearing "Jewish Rumors" that someone's grandparent said that was the family's roots.  Or that DNA tests showed this was so.  Or that the Hungarians were Nazis or that they were actually more tolerant of having Jewish people in the country.  Or was that only along the grape growing and wine trade regions? Maybe even the "Jewish Rumors" that are always around about Princess William of Wales a.k.a Kate Middleton makes me wonder just how many generations of living as Christians does a family have to be to prove otherwise.


When it comes to finding genealogy archival documents, basically from the late 1700's Catholic churches in smaller towns and villages were keeping the records of marriages both "mixed" and of non parishioners because there was no mandate for civil registrations.  This was practical because sometimes the priest at the church was one of the few who could read and write and also because so many people lived in wooden structures in villages and on estates but it was only the church or the residences of wealthy people who were made of stone that might better withstand a fire. In the larger cities where there were separate structures for the Reformed church, the Catholic church, and the Jewish Synagogue, records were kept individually - at least after that structure was built.  Still, I have frequently checked these even when not expecting someone to be on them, just in case.


In all the records I have read, the name Judit is fairly rare, and to me a "giveaway" that the person in Jewish.  So I found an attempt to address this question by someone named Kinga Frojimovics on the JewishGen site.  To me her sampling seems limited and this is originally from 2003 but it's probably still worth the read. This article gives the dates for surname adoption.
JEWISH GEN - KINGA FROJIMOVICS - JEWISH NAMING CUSTOMS HUNGARY


As a comparison, when I do American genealogy I sometimes come across families in which "Old Testament" names have been given to the children but I find them going to the Baptist or another church and I don't find them buried in Jewish graveyards.  There are many names that are "Old Testament" that have been popular for Americans at different time periods: consider the names Sharon and Deborah for instance. But in Hungary you can encounter naming patterns that are far less about the parents just liking the name, and more about honoring the birth order among the common villagers, or ancestors with nobles being given multiple names at baptisms that seem to be less ordinary.


As for surnames and titles, I think things get more mysterious for us 21st century researchers who are trying to understand how different people lived and thought way back when, as well as make our way through those charters and other manuscripts that mention important families, even when on our knees in thanks when we find one that is very legible and neatly written though in Old Hungarian; to some extent we take the word of the translator.


One article I read said that Turanism was the name given to those who were sure that Hungarians had Asian roots.  Well, was this family the Turanszke's especially devoted to that belief?  Was this perhaps because they themselves knew that their ancestors came from Asia?


Anyone wishing to give an opinion?

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

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USING JEWISH GEN TO NAVIGATE EUROPE MAPS BY LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE (and lots of other good info!)

LATITUDE AND LONGITUDE - those are the degrees going around the globe (latitude) and degrees going north to south (longitude) that are used to locate a place.

You don't have to be Jewish to use Jewishgen.

I have to say that I do have a little hesitation to count on it because back in the day I knew volunteers who were combing through LDS films to present databases of Jewish people and they didn't include people they thought were not Jewish and included some - based on first names like Noah or Sarah - who were not Jewish but who sounded like they might be to the individual doing the culling. This was the perspective of volunteers who knew so little about Christianity that they didn't know that Old Testament names are to this day given to Christian Children.

But onto the little lesson I have for you today.  If you use JEWISHGEN to locate a community you will get a page and a map, sometimes with old postcards attached.  Here is the one for KIRALY HELMECZ.

JEWISH GEN YIZKOR ETC FOR KRALOVSKY 

It says it can be located at 48°25' / 21°59' .  You can use that on the old maps that give latitude and longitude like the one I just wrote about, the Austrian Military Survey.

You can get an old street map like this (from the site.)

You find a book about the Jews of this town to read, before and after the Holocaust.  This would be interesting just to get a feel for life in the Old Country when your ancestors lived there.  (In another town's page I learned how many Jewish houses and how many Christian houses were burned in a fire.)  A Yizkor book is a memory book.  They are usually dedicated to the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust.