Hungarian Passport Records (c. 1905)

Berin Szóka

Is it possible to find Hungarian passport records from around 1905? If so how?

I ask because I am trying to establish Hungarian citizenship claims for my cousins, and possibly myself. My great-grandfather was born in Hungary in 1880, came to the US in/around 1905, and remained here for the rest of his life.

I'm told that it's possible that he was not issued a passport and that he might have exited the Empire and entered the US without one. But it's also possible he was issued a passport. If so, we don't know what happened to it.

If he did get a passport, he would have remained an Hungarian citizen until 10 years after the expiration date on his passport. That means all his children would have automatically acquired Hungarian citizenship at birth, and thus so did their descendants (at least, descendants of his sons).

I think what I'm looking for, specifically, is the register kept by the Hungarian government noting the expiration date of his passport. (Wikipedia tells me that there was no common Austro-Hungarian citizenship, so there were always separate Austrian and Hungarian passports, never a common one.)

Julia Szent-Györgyi

A fellow researcher replied to your question in a roundabout way (in Hungarian, on one of the Hungarian forums):

Nekem úgy tűnik, hogy ha maradtak, akkor inkább a megyei levéltárban, de nem sok minden. Az egyik könyvben azt írják hogy: „Az útlevéltörvény életbe lépése után, az 1903 utáni időszakban kiadott útleveleket és az ezzel kapcsolatos dokumentumokat időrendi sorrendben adjuk közre. (Sajnos a lejárt útlevelek kezelésére nem tért ki a törvény, így viszonylag szűk forrásanyagból lehetett a mellékelt dokumentumokat kiválasztani.)” Emlékszem, Catherine is a kárpátaljai, megyei útlevelekkel kapcsolatos iratokat indexelte, és a fentebb említett könyv is somogyi levéltárból hoz példát. A Külügy utazás- és útlevélosztálya csak 1919-től állt fel.

Nagy segítség lehet ez is: https://aktakaland.wordpress.com/2017/01/26/search-for-your-emigrant-ancestors/

"It seems to me that if anything remains, then it's more likely in the county archives, but there isn't much. In one of the books, they write 'We present in chronological order passports and related documents issued in the post-1903 period, after the passport law came into effect. (Unfortunately the law did not address the treatment of expired passports, so the included documents had to be chosen from a relatively small pool.)' I remember that Catherine indexed county passport-related documents for Subcarpathia, and the above-mentioned book has examples from the Somogy county archive. The State Department's travel and passport division has only been in existence since 1919.

The following may be of much help as well: https://aktakaland.wordpress.com/2017/01/26/search-for-your-emigrant-ancestors/"

(Catherine is the Aussie responsible for the Carpathian Reflections site, which started as an attempt at sorting the mess on FS of Greek Catholic films from the Munkács diocese, but has since expanded to include many other sorts of records as well.)