Hungarian Birth Records
The attached image is taken from the FHL Film 2010713, this film contains records from Zsadany (Zdana). This page contains birth records.
Please view the following birth records:16 Jan or Jun 1795, 30 Nov 1795, 16 Jun 1796,
13 Oct 1796, and 20 Oct 1799. I don't believe the childs surname in any of these records is Torok.
Now search this film on Family Search using Torok in the last name and a date range of 1795 to 1799, each of the above birth dates should appear on the first page. You will see that in each record the child's and father's surname is Torok.
I am certainly no expert in interpreting Hungarian records but there seems to be something wrong with Family Search's translation of these records.
I am trying to research my Torok ancestors and I am totally confused with this translation by Family Search.Can someone please help me understand the error in my thinking?
Thank You
Lewis Klapka
Answers
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It looks like that page was indexed by someone who should not have been allowed to do so, as he or she had absolutely no concept of the Hungarian language, and made many grievous errors, such as indexing the godparents as the parents (like in your examples), putting annya "his/her mother" as the mother's given name (for the 25 Sep 1797 entry), or even getting off by a line and indexing the previous entry's godparents as the parents (for the 20 Oct 1799 entry).
Granted, the indexer's task was complicated by the scribe's laziness: he didn't record any fathers in the entries between June 1795 and Feb 1797. (As you surmise, the first entry on the page is correctly June, not January.) For some reason, instead of indexing, say, 16 June, child Maria Varga, father [blank] Varga, mother Ersébeth Misák, the indexer decided to ignore the Ks before "Attya" and "Annya" and put child Maria, father István Török, mother Anna Krappa. The post-processing then turned the child from the clearly-recorded Varga Maria into the nonexistent Maria Török.
Unfortunately, the Slovakia Church Books indexes are not correctable even when the image is available, so I don't know what to suggest, short of acquiring all of the images somehow and looking for Török on them "longhand".
(Try not to leave off the diacritics: Török = "Turk", Torok = "throat".🙃)
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Hello Julia, I was dissapointed on two levels after reading your response. 1.) That the indexing errors were caused by sloppy workmanship and 2.) That the errors can not be corrected. I am astonished that the errors can not be corrected. I would think that Family Search would do everything in their power to make their records as accurrate as possible. If the website has known errors in their records and refuses to correct them what does that say about the integrity of Family Search?
Can you provide further detail as to why these records are not correctable?
I am familiar with the terms Attya and Annya but what does the Ks preceding them mean?
I am aware of the different meanings of Török and Torok, I just get lazy and don't want to switch to my Hungarian keyboard.
I want to be clear, that while I am dissappointed in the contents of your response, I am not at all dissappointed with the effort that you put into making it a accurrate and meaningful response. As always, I am very appreciative of all the help you have provided me in my Hingarian research.
Lewis Klapka
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K in this case is short for kereszt ("cross"); keresztattya and keresztannya are old-fashioned spellings of keresztatyja "his/her godfather" and keresztanyja "his/her godmother".
I have no idea why the Slovakia church book indexes are not correctable. I have hope that they will eventually become editable: the other ongoing indexing project that I generally work on, the Hungarian civil registrations, was uneditable as recently as a year ago, but is now not merely correctable, but correctable using the new "edit everything" tool. This tool is still a work in progress, but it allows (or will allow, once the kinks have been worked out) the editing of every field, along with the addition or deletion of fields and entries, and the addition/correction/deletion of relationships and household groupings.
In the meantime, the thing to keep in mind is that an index is not the data: it is merely a finding aid for the record. FS -- like all of the online genealogy sites -- blurs this distinction rather thoroughly, because even with recent advances in teaching computers to read handwriting, an image of a register page is not computer-parseable the way an index entry is computer-parseable.
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