Your Roots in Historic Hungary

by Vic Berecz

4. The Family History Library (FHL) On-Line.

Background. One of the great resources family history researchers have at their disposal is the Family History Library (FHL) maintained by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – often referred to as the LDS Church, and its members as Mormons. While the FHL is a brick-and-mortar establishment associated with that church’s headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, there is also a significant, and growing, Internet presence for the FHL. That will be the focus of this article.

But, the major resource of the FHL, especially for those of us researching ancestors in historic Hungary, is their collection of microfilmed records. They maintain well over 10,000 rolls of microfilm with records of historic Hungary. These are not yet available on-line – though an on-going project promises to make them available on-line by 2015.

These include the church registers of virtually every church that existed in the 1830-1895 period in the territory associated with present-day Hungary. Personally, I’ve researched the church registers of over one-hundred towns. To date, there is only one church I know of whose registers are not available on FHL microfilms … that exception is the Reformed church of Mór in Fejér county. Without a trip to Salt Lake, this vast array of microfilmed resources are available to you at a local Family History Center (FHC), most of which are located in LDS Church facilities. A second focus of this article will be on using the on-line resources to determine which microfilms you want to study at an FHC. The next article will describe how to use that FHC.

Many non-Mormons do not understand the rationale for the LDS Church’s huge investment in records to support genealogical research. According to Wikipedia, “The LDS church holds that deceased persons who have not accepted or had the opportunity to accept the gospel of Christ in this life will have the opportunity to accept the gospel in the afterlife … [and] they must also receive all the ordinances that a living person is expected to receive, including baptism. For this reason, members of the LDS Church are encouraged to seek out their genealogy. … Latter-day Saints complete genealogical work for deceased persons and if it is determined an individual has not received some or all of the saving ordinances, the individual's name is submitted to the temple to receive these ordinances by proxy. Optimally, the proxy who stands in will be a descendant of the deceased person, but the ordinance proxy may also be an unrelated volunteer.”

The genealogy resources of the FHL are available to all, without regard to their own religion. As a practicing Lutheran, I have made regular and extensive use of FHL resources for almost twenty years, and I very much appreciate the support of the FHL and the volunteers at the local FHC’s that I use in my family history research.

Overview of the FHL Website: Start by visiting the homepage of www.FamilySearch.org -- this is the top-level webpage tht includes all FHL information. Here note that you can download for free a copy of the Personal Ancestral File (PAF) v5.2. This is a basic, widely-used genealogy software product. I personally use another product – RootsMagic v3.2.4 – for its superior graphics and other features. But, if you have never used genealogy software, PAF may be a very good place to start.

You may wish to experiment with the Search feature on the home page of the website, or the more complete search feature you will find under the “Search” tab. But, information for people in historic Hungary is quite limited in the Ancestral File and the International Geological Index – the two principal databases for continental Europe that are presently available in the Search feature. The “Share” tab is for those who wish to share their findings with others. We will not deal with that feature here.

Therefore, let’s go directly to the “Library” tab. Fig 4-01 illustrates a part of the Library homepage. The homepage provides some interesting statistics about the scope of the FHL, and at the left has a menu of options, primarily of interest to users of the library in Salt Lake City. The second tab labeled “Family History Centers” takes you to a search-engine that finds for you FHC’s in a particular area. If you are unsure of the location of an FHC in your area, this will give you the address, phone number, and hours of operation. I have personally used the FHC’s in Fort Myers, FL and Bloomfield and Woodbridge, CT.

Those readers in the Connecticut area will find the Woodbridge FHC of particular interest. Because of the large number of Hungarian-Americans and Slovak-Americans in southwestern Connecticut, the volunteers in this FHC are particularly knowledgeable in the genealogy of historic Hungary. Also, there are literally hundreds of reels of microfilm containing records of historic Hungary on permanent loan to this center. These are freely available to all patrons.

The fourth tab labeled “Education” lists a variety of educational opportunities available. These are provided by both the FHL and outside organizations. One of these is a free on-line version of Brigham Young University’s course titled Religion 261: Introduction to Family History. Some of you may be interested in pursuing this more formal approach to educating yourself in family history research.

The third tab – “Family History Library Catalog” – is the key element of the website for our purposes. Click on the tab and see the webpage shown in Fig 4-02. As with most library catalogs, it may be searched in a variety of ways. If you are interested in books, you may search by Title or Author. For compiled genealogies, the Surname search may be useful. But we are interested primarily in microfilms, and we don’t know them by Film Number. Therefore, most frequently researchers of historic Hungary will use the Place Search feature.

But first, a little background. Most of the FHL’s microfilms covering places in present-day Hungary were filmed in Budapest in the 1960s. Two master copies were made – one went to the FHL, the other to the Hungarian archives. So, the material available in the FHL is identical to the archives in Budapest – no need to travel there to access this information. Over subsequent decades, extensive filming was done of historic Hungarian records elsewhere … first in Slovenia and Austrian Burgenland, and more recently in Croatia and Slovakia. Unfortunately, little filming has been done to date in the parts of Serbia, Romania, and the Ukraine which were in historic Hungary.

Use of the Place Search Feature: One of the four basic pieces of information that we sought for your immigrant ancestors is their town of birth. To see which, if any, records are available for those towns you will use Place Search in the FHL Catalog. For my example, I will use the small city of Sárvár in Vas county in the northwest of present-day Hungary. Fig 4-03 shows the Place Search page with the entry for my sample search. You may wish to try the same search to see the features mentioned, but not illustrated below. Note that when using Place Search, you do not enter any diacritical marks (accents, umlauts, etc).

I usually use the optional Part of feature in Place Search. Since returned places are anything that begins with the letters you specify, this eliminates many extraneous results from other parts of the world. But, when you are working with towns that were a part of historic Hungary, but are not a part of present-day Hungary, make sure you are consistent in Place and Part of – use the Hungarian place name with “Hungary” but if you use the current place name, make certain you use the current country name. For instance: Puczincz, Hungary will produce the same results as Puconci, Slovenia … but Puconci, Hungary will get you nowhere!

Now back to our Sárvár example. When you click Search you will see two entries (not illustrated). One is for Hungary, Vas, Sárvár – note that the name is correctly accented, and the county is identified as Vas. But, there is a second entry for Sárvár (kerület) – or Sárvár region. “Kerület” entries usually refer to the records of a military base in the area of the town, and so will not be further discussed here.

The next step is to click on the link to Hungary, Vas, Sárvár. The result is shown in Fig 4-04. Now we see that the FHL has three types of records for this city: a) Church Records – for towns in present-day Hungary these usually go only to 1895; b) Civil Registration – these records usually go from 1895 and end before World War I; they only exist for the larger towns with notary offices; and c) Jewish Records – which obviously exist only in places with a Jewish congregation. Explore the Civil Registration link on your own, and you will see that there were separate notary offices for the city of Sárvár and the surrounding villages. If you check out the Jewish records, you will see these also end in 1895 when Hungary changed from church to civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths. But, only rarely do Jewish records go back earlier than 1830. Note the button at the upper-right reading View Related Places – that’s important, more about it later.

If we click on Church Records, we see (not illustrated) that there were two churches in Sárvár – Roman Catholic and Evangelical (Lutheran). We will continue our example with the Roman Catholic church. The catalog shows that the Catholic church registers (anyakönyvek) go from 1646-1895. This is an extremely long period and their existence is likely due to the fact that the northwestern part of present-day Hungary was never occupied by the Turks.

Clicking on the link for the Roman Catholic church gives us further information about those church records, as seen in Fig 4-05. Here we find that the records were filmed in 1965, are in the Hungarian and Latin languages, are on eight rolls of microfilm, and include indices. Wow! If you’re from a Catholic family that lived in Sárvár, you’ll have a field-day!

The last step in Place Search is to click on that little button at the upper-right that says View Film Notes. Here we will see exactly what is on each roll of film as well as the film numbers needed for ordering. The film notes for the Sárvár Catholic church are seen in Fig 4-06. At the left is a description of the contents of each of the eight films, and at the right is the seven-digit film number for ordering. [Note: if there are less than 7 digits, add leading 0’s – most Hungarian records filmed in the 1960s begin with 06.] Looking over the notes, we see that deaths (halottak) were not recorded until 1739. Also, we see that there is a gap in the records of baptisms (kereszteltek) and marriages (házasultak) during the period of the Rákoczi rebellion at the beginning of the 18^th century. Finally we see that the last film is an index of baptisms, marriages, and deaths for the entire period. Such indices are extremely rare and very valuable to researchers when they are available. That’s the end of the example. The next step is to order films at your local FHC … that process will be covered in the next article in this series.

This all sounds so easy, but what if you enter a place name and your search results in that terrible message: No Matching Places Found? Many small villages did not have a church … people used a church in a neighboring town or village. A map may help with this problem, but there is better approach that will yield only the names of towns for which the FHL has records. If you enter into the original Place Search webpage the name of a county rather than the name of a town (Vas for instance), you’ll get a set of results that always includes includes county information … in this case that entry will simply read Hungary, Vas. Click on that entry and you will get a page that looks like Fig 4-07 listing all the categories of information available in the FHL for that county. Many of these appear to be of great interest to a family history researcher, and we may deal with some of them in future articles. But, that’s not our point here. Instead, click on the button at the upper-right that reads View Related Places. That will give you a list of all the towns in the county which have entries in the FHL catalog. The resulting webpage is not shown here because in Vas county there are 333 places listed … but try it yourself. Now, with this list on-screen, use that map to find one of these places near the village you’re looking for. Another advantage of this list is that it shows the spelling used in the catalog … often you may have difficulty with placenames that include prefixes (like Alsó meaning “lower”) or with more than one word (like Szent-György). These are sometime hypenated, sometimes run together.

Explore this example yourself to get a feel for the options and types of information available. Then move on the the towns where your immigrant ancestors originated. Enjoy!

Summary. The next article will address how to work with microfilms at a Family History Center, once you have the film number(s) you’d like to use. I’d like to tailor subsequent articles to reader’s interests. Therefore, your feedback would be appreciated. Write me at Vic@Berecz.us

Next: Using your Local Family History Center.