town in Hungary
In my relative's Declaration of Intent, he lists his birthplace as Vagnesta, Hungary, 1878.
When I do a search on this town, I don't get any matches for Vagnesta.
Suggestions???
Thanks very much!
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Any chance of a link to said Declaration?
The river Vág joins the "Little Danube" just before that branch rejoins the main river in Komárom (Komárno). There were multiple places along the Vág that included the river's name as a disambiguating prefix, but none of them are anything like "nesta". Could it be a misreading of Vágvecse? That was a village in Nyitra county; it's now Veča, part of Šaľa, Slovakia (which was formerly Vágsellye).
Another possibility is that the V is a misreading of an N: nagy means "big, greater", and it is a very common prefix in the names of places -- although again, none of them are anything like "nesta".
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If you could provide a link or a photo of the post, we might be able to help.
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The declaration of intent should contain the date and ship of arrival which you can use to find the manifest. https://stevemorse.org/ellis2/ellisgold.html can help you. I recommend checking a few days before and after date of arrival - it is frequently a little off.
The manifest can help you in two ways.
- There may be close family on the same ship (siblings, parents, aunts, uncles or cousins) that may have left from the same town or a neighboring town. You may be able to find that if you can find records related to them
- There may be fields for town from whence ancestor left, where they were born, or where their closest relative in the country from whence they came lived.
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Here is the Declaration of Intent.
Thank you all so much!
Michelene
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And here is the ship manifest for John Leskovsky, line 26.
Ship: Koln
Departure: from Bremen, April 23, 1903
Arrival: Baltimore, May 10, 1903
Thanks!
Michelene
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The arrival manifest gives Budapest as his last residence, so that's no help. Perhaps it would pay to investigate his destination contact? I read it as "brother-in-law Stefan Gallik" in Cleveland.
That's the typewritten declaration, so it has a layer of typist's interpretation between us and the original information. I see his petition has his birthplace indexed as "Vaguesta" (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QGRF-LZJ8). The declaration and petition are images 595 and 596 on film/image group 7760899; it looks like image 597 is also him (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QGRF-KLJH), but you don't have that attached to his Family Tree profile. I don't know what part of the naturalization process it contains -- the index is certainly not particularly informative -- but you could ask the Family History Library's Lookup Service for the image, just to make sure it doesn't offer a version of his birthplace that's "closer to the horse's mouth".
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Here are images 595, 596, and 597.
Thanks!
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596 is handwritten, so probably closer to "primary" than the others, but it's still proving difficult.
I keep coming back to Vágvecse, Nyitra county. One of the archaic ways to write the /ch/ sound in it is 'ts': Vágvetse. It's not very far from that to Vagvesta or Vaguesta as a misremembered spelling, especially if the person was only semi-literate. The problem is, Roman Catholic residents of Vecse were recorded in Tornócz, and there's no sign of any Leskovskis in those registers, nor of a John (or anyone, actually) born on 31 Jan 1878 (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:939F-1SG7-M?i=127&cc=1554443).
I tried coming at it from his wife's end, but that's even worse: Kroetia or Kroctia? Hungarian phonology doesn't love initial consonant clusters, so I'm not surprised not to find anything like that in the gazetteers, but even the -tia ending is proving elusive. In fact, I'm wondering if they meant Croatia. In January of 1914, that was still under the Hungarian crown, so it sort of makes sense to write it as "Croatia, Hungary"....
(I checked: there's nothing like "Vaguesta" in Croatia, either.)
I'll keep looking: I want to solve this mystery.
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