What are the first indications that your ancestors were considered to be noble, besides family rumors? A notation in a birth, marriage, or death record.
A story: This reminds me of someone I was related to through marriage. I offered to share my research on the line I shared with her spouse and children. I knew that they had been raised with no knowledge of that line because she and her family dominated, and they had been raised to think of themselves as all Italian.
"Oh no!" she said, waving me off. "There's no need for you to do the research. My cousin did ours all the way back to Queen Antoinette!"
Did she mean Marie Antoinette of France? (Daughter of Marie Theresa?) The "Let them eat cake" Queen who had no children who lived long enough to mate?
Perhaps she meant a noble woman named Antoinette in Southern Italy? I sensed a genealogy confabulation and couldn't help myself. I had to start researching to find their link to any Queen even if she had no interest.
I discovered their heritage was Sephardic Jewish in Salonika, Greece, and then into Italy with significant marriages between first cousins. The move wasn't recent, so they appeared in Catholic Church records. I never did find a Queen. There was an Italian noble woman whose estate was kind and accepting to Jewish people in the town that the ancestors left in Italy but that surname didn't show up in their lines. Perhaps a story of a kind noble woman who lived on a hill seeped into their family?
Moral of the story?
Don't fake your Genealogy.
(It's said that 40 % of Italians have Jewish roots. Watching the genealogy series Finding Your Roots, the episode on fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg's Jewish roots reminded me of this ex relative. DVF also has Salonika roots.)
So, Americans with Hungarian roots depend on the existing church records available for free at FamilySearch which are also part of the Slovak collection. Settlements appear under their Slovak names there. Although it says that Protestant and Jewish records are included, after many years I question that. The headings on columns tend to be in Latin and the handwriting language is in Latin and /or Hungarian. Or a mix - some German.
Due to a recent search for the baptism of someone who just is not coming up in Roman Catholic records I found a new resource based in Hungary. The web site is oskereso.hu and it is birth/Christening, marriage and death records collected by the Hungarian Evangelical Church, (Lutheran). I found the translation interesting. Progenitor Research. Motherly birth certificate? Scan for villages and it appears that where there's an Evangelical Church, there are records. Hidasnemeti, for instance.
I have only found notations that someone marrying a Roman Catholic was Greek Catholic or Jewish a few times in Roman Catholic records and the name appears only due to the intermarriage. Further, as I have, in microfilm days, read Jewish records and Greek Catholic records, they were separate congregations and records/ films. So maybe it's just that my research using the online database hasn't lead to even Protestant records. (Family search has a Reform Baptism Index which doesn't seem to work for me.)
However, it is true that until there were civil records, church records were where birth/ baptism, marriage and death records were kept, and I imagine everyone had to be affiliated with a congregation to be in records. Likely if you lived in the forest or way up on the mountain you might not get to church too often.
One of my friends deep into her pre–Colonial American research tells me her grandmother's sister was born at home and no birth certificate meant difficulty in getting a driver's license.
A noble with a private estate and entourage might not go into the village or mix with the commoners to be baptized or married or have a funeral. Unless he or she had built the church maybe. They had private chapels and visits from priests and church dignitaries. Therefore, ecclesiastical records or private estate papers in archives are needed. It's time to seek information through an archive or try Hungaricana.
Considering that nobility privilege was abolished 1848, you'll find that priests were still writing in "nemes", or "nobilis" or notes suggesting a parent is of this status after that. It does not mean they have wealth. But why then would the priest bother to write it in?
Before government funded social welfare systems, there was a strong emphasis on marriage and being ready financially to be married. Women were born into their job descriptions and prepared for the role of woman; bearing children, raising them, and being closer to home to perform household work. A woman might plant and tend a home garden and feed chickens and milk cows. Like Colonial American women, they did what we'd think of as difficult hard labor. They might participate in harvest as well. (There were women who tended farmer's market stands and peddled in towns.)
Men were in charge of supporting wives and children - the traditional work outside the home. In the 19th century the definition of a orphan was a fatherless child. It was understood a child needed a daddy.
A commoner man usually prepared to be a master craftsman or to continue in agriculture or travel for trade. While individuals, families, or communities might lend some support, such as women sharing childcare or all looking after village children, or a just married couple living in the same cottage on a farm, there was no government program to depend on. The facts of life were all around them.
Religion and culture demanded that first came marriage to a man who could support a family, then children. Young men grew up knowing what was expected of them. A woman was taking a major risk in pregnancy without marriage. I have seen it time and time again in church records, the deaths of babies born to single mothers within months of birth. Yes, children died more quickly in general and women died in childbirth more frequently too - infection, childhood diseases - but all those little handwritten crosses on the birth records are telling.
This is why the priest wrote in notes about the groom's professional or "condition" / finances and why godparents (and marriage witnesses) were also called "testifiers." This was a reaffirmation of support. However illegitimate children and their mothers were at a distinct disadvantage because people took care of their own first and honestly, some of these babies starved to death.
It's sometimes possible for you to discover that a woman who had a child without marriage then does marry. I always hope the father of her first child was the man she married. That it's a love story.
Why with so much understanding of the need for a husband fit for marriage and pressure to conform were women still having illegitimate children?
We can rarely know the circumstances for certain but rape by soldiers, travelers, and employers - including noble employers - and affairs with married men wasn't unheard of. Poor or unmarried women without family turned to living in as servants and some became prostitutes. People had affairs though it must have been difficult in small settlements to keep it secret. I've also seen "father in America" in notations.
Let's say you see an illegitimate birth on a church record, the woman is a servant, and the godparents are nobility. Very likely the woman lived in their household. A noble woman may have had higher status than her common neighbors, but she wasn't ruling the roost.
It would be wrong of me not to mention the plight of some of our female ancestors and relatives and the fact that a DNA test might link you to nobility rather than a trail of documents.
Now, another possible way to suspect wealth and / or nobility is when the couple getting married are younger than the usual craftsman apprentice. Nobles sometimes arranged marriage at a distance and sent along a 13- or 14-year-old bride to be raised in her mother in law's household. The groom could be as young, a couple years older, or a much older widowed noble. In 19th century records I've seen 15- and 16-year-old noble brides. Why besides allegiances, fertility, and presumed health?
Because there is money enough to support the family without having to become an apprentice or worker. (Don't be too shocked to see daughters of immigrants to America also marrying that young. There was no time for teenagerhood or extended immaturity.
That said, you will find there are plenty of impoverished "landless gentry" who had to work. Many went to cities to take government jobs.
If you do find nobility of the higher estate owning type in your heritage, be open to the possibility of linking to a great many other nobles! And to evidence of more travel and movement. The girl next door or the next village is for people who don't get too far from home.
Cherish notes and translate them!
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This post is part of a series on Hungarian Nobility research. To pull up the series click on the tag Gen Tips - Hungarian Nobility in the Family
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