THE AUSTRIAN-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE : GALICIA : CADASTRAL MAPS : HOUSE NUMBERS : GENEALOGY GEN-TIPS SERIES #3

THE AUSTRIAN-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE : GALICIA : CADASTRAL MAPS : HOUSE NUMBERS : GENEALOGY GEN-TIPS SERIES #3

Térkép is the Hungarian word for map. Térképek is the Hungarian word for maps. Vármegye is the Hungarian word for county. Some of the maps will use LATIN and some will use GERMAN.

A real find is when the register of a Cadastral Map that was made with the map still exists. The  register equates the numbers on the map, the numbers on the map, with the names of the property owners!  

This is especially helpful because basically the current day numbering system for buildings cannot be counted on to reflect the place a person lived or the land they owned back in the day. (I know you wanted to use Google maps to see where they lived using that information but...)

In villages and towns, even those with streets that were named and still have the same name today, the numbering system is not the same. For instance, today, if you want an address in a town in America, you will find that the even numbers are on one side of the street and the odd numbers on the other. Houses actually have house numbers on them and that's your official address for mail and packages and probably is the address on your driver's license or ID. Streets and roads are easy to identify with so much signage. That's not how house and buildings were numbered, if at all, in villages and small towns where everybody knew everybody and a stranger could easily get instructions on where to find someone. A local would show where to go by pointing, walking you there, or telling you to follow a curve in the road until you came to a big tree.

Houses in old Europe were often given numbers in the order they were built.  I've heard it said that the lower the number the older the building.  I've also heard it said that the numbers went up the further from the church. There are many churches that were built near an especially scenic or otherwise good location, such as near a running stream. Usually a settlement came first, and then, if there were enough people to attend a church, a church. (Find out when the church was built and if your ancestors lived in a village before it was build, their church records are likely at another village.) 

House numbers on births, marriages, and death records can help you identify family members - even generational members. The house (or farm or estate) number is where the event happened. (That means that if the birth was at the house of the midwife rather than at home the number might not be the family home,  but usually midwives came to the house of the birthing mother.) Most valuable are the numbers that appear on marriage records since they reflect where the bride and the groom were living at the time of the marriage, though the ritual happened in the church. You may be able to see if they started their married life in with parents and which household, and perhaps how long they lived there through the births of children, until they found a place of their own. Tradition in Hungarian culture was that the bride went to live with her husband's family.

One last thing.  The "house number" may actually not be the number of a HOUSE but of a PROPERTY that has many dwellings on it, such as a communal farmstead. This may account for a number of surnames at that number, including the boy and girl "nextdoor" who marry.  It may also represent the property being split among descendants.

So let's take a look at HUNGARICANA DATABASES LINK TO MAPS

HUNGARICANA MAPS LINKS  There are many maps of the capital, Budapest, but an array of towns.  Don't stop looking if the place you want is not on this list. Instead run a search for the name of the town (which will probably be included in the county.)

Here are cadastral maps of Livazeny - really terrific!  See the names of the land owners and then the land they owned. HUNGARICANA - LIVAZENY  (fixed link August 14 2025)

Some maps are not of the "town" but of the agricultural land and may include plans for moving water or what crops or trees are planted.  Some of these maps include the names of the owners of that land.

Here is a map that is in LATIN and shows where the vineyards and orchards are:

MAPS HUNGARICANA MEGYE - GONC RUSKA

Delineatio praedii Klastrom I (nclito) Comit(tat) ui Abaujvari  (Latin) 

I ran a search for LIPTO County and all these came up! HUNGARICANA MAPS LIPTO  notice that when you click on the map it brings up the modern map/location.

In the next post we'll look at another MAP RESOURCE!

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

To bring up all posts in the series click on the label below!

C 2024 Magyar-American BlogSpot

DATABASE TO OTHER LOCATIONS : GENEALOGY MYOPIA: USING FAMILYSEARCH FOR HUNGARIAN GENEALOGY RESEARCH - STRATEGY #5

DATABASE TO OTHER LOCATIONS : GENEALOGY MYOPIA: USING FAMILYSEARCH FOR HUNGARIAN GENEALOGY RESEARCH - STRATEGY #5

GENEALOGY MYOPIA is very common.  That's why you get map or border bound. Or bound by your assumptions.  It's easy enough to fall into this trap.  After all, RECORDS ARE ORGANIZED BY COUNTIES, even if lives were not.

You're excited to learn, using the immigration/ ship records/ or Naturalization records in the United States or the World War I draft registration of your ancestor, the name of a village or town in the Old Country they left or were born in. Then you find the Baptismal Record for your great grandpa that agrees with what it says on his U.S. military - draft registration, his Social Security Application, his Death Certificate. (That's proofing!) So you become knowledgeable about that town and place in the Old Country and may hope someday to travel there. Pretty soon you keep isolating or "refining" your searches on databases and otherwise for more ancestors to that place, say Szatmar County, and darn, nothing much is coming up.  

You expand out County after County and pretty soon you're learning the Old German or the New Slovak names for settlements in Lipto. There is entirely too much information, too much too sort through, but you lose track of time while you research.

If you're lucky, using a database you'll find the same family before they moved to the location you started with. Some couples and some births make sense -agreeing with other documents. Again, without DEATH RECORDS and MARRIAGE (and REMARRIAGE) RECORDS, it may be impossible to proof your research and proof you must. Scan using the parent's names and see what comes up and let that lead you to the images of the microfilms.  MARRIAGE and DEATH RECORDS are necessary to proof.

If database use is bringing up TOO MUCH INFORMATION, consider looking at a map of Hungary as it existed before 1920 and look at the counties.  Also look at old maps for old roads and village locations. (It's easier to go around a mountain on a road than cross it by foot. And the railroads improved transportation and greatly influenced which towns prospered.)

Some of the old counties such as ZEMPLEN are now much in SLOVAKIA and many previously Hungarian counties are in ROMANIA now. The FAMILYSEARCH DATABASE does recognize that Hungarian researchers may find themselves in Slovakia and visa versa but that doesn't mean you won't need to go to records in "CZECHOSLOVAKIA", AUSTRIA, POLAND, YUGOSLAVIA, SERBIA, CROATIA, or ROMANIA or UKRAINE. 

Be it the United States or another country, try not to get map bound. This is especially the case if the place someone lived is NEAR A BORDER. Consider that a person could have lived their whole life in one place but left to live elsewhere in old age (perhaps in with a child who would care for them - in the case of Hungary this was usually a DAUGHTER - and may be buried elsewhere, such as a family graveyard in another county, or the less expensive cemetery in the next county. 

C 2019-2025 Magyar American BlogSpot All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights.

This post was slightly edited on August 13, 2019

To bring up the series of posts on this subject, click on the tag GenTips: Hungarian- FamilySearch  

ROSE OF BOHEMIA - FASCINATING

CENRTICI HYPOTHESES ORG - ROSE OF BOHEMIA  by Jack Keilo (Jacques Keilo) 

EXCERPT:  Today our map is the HOHEMIAU ROSA by CHr,. Vetter, Vienna, 1668, a map representing Bohemia s a rose centered on Prague.  

FIGURE 1. Rose of Bohemia, by Chr. Vetter, 1668

Rush to this sight which is truly fascinating. it shows how art and maps were used for the purpose of ethnocentricity, and of course it concerns also Hungary and national identity.

CARTOON MAPS OF EUROPE - WORLD WAR I ERA

PUBLIC DOMAIN REVIEW - CARTOON MAP EUROPE 1914


Warning!  These are from a German perspective and are focused on military.

more at the link!

HEART SHAPED WORLD

Heart Shaped Political Map

Medieval French

Google Public Domain Vintage Search

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.

GROUPS OF ETHNICITY IN HUNGARY : The History and Present-day Organization of Hungarian Ethnology

"Reaching over present-day borders, partly from geographical, partly from historical consideration, we can divide that part of the Carpathian Basin into four large sections where the mother tongue of the people who live there is Hungarian. Transdanubia (the Dunántúl) is the western territory bordered by the Danube and the Dráva rivers, and there are also smaller Hungarian areas in Austria. Upper Hungary (the Felföld) contains the northern hill and mountain area and reaches into Slovakia. The Great Plain (Alföld) is the central plain of the Carpathian Basin, which continues into Yugoslavia on the south. The Hungarian ethnic groups of Transylvania (Erdély) in places even sweep through the crest of the Eastern Carpathians. We will follow this geographical division in the following chapters." Just a tiny excerpt from a paper entitled "The History and Present-day Organization of Hungarian Ethnology. "

A WONDERFUL PROGRESSION OF MAPS and COAT OF ARMS - HUNGARY

KOSSUTH COAT OF ARMS - JUST ONE OF MANY in this very interesting site from Hungarian Images and Historical Background © 1994 András Szeitz szeitz@unixg.ubc.ca