Trouble Finding Information
I'm looking for my Great-Great Grandfather Raymund Roubal. Based on my family word of mouth, he's from Tolna, Hungary area. I'm not finding anything on FamilySearch or other search option listed. Any ideas on other places to search?
Comments
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Tolna is an entire county; your question is like looking for "Raymond Roberts in Massachusetts".
Or, to put it a different way: a century to start with might be nice. (No, his being your g-g-gf doesn't answer this. My spouse has a great-great-grandfather who was born in 1784; my best friend has one born in 1878. My best friend is four years younger than my spouse.)
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In places that are (and therefore were) in Hungary, the pre-1895 indexes of Roman Catholic and Reformed baptisms have been available for a long time now, and they have been shared with Ancestry and MyHeritage, so there are lots of ways to find them. However, neither the indexes nor the microfilmed (and now digitized) church registers that they're based on are anywhere near complete, and the indexes are full of errors.
Until a couple of years ago, for other denominations and events, searching "longhand" (by browsing through images) used to be the only method available. However, this is no longer true: some Lutheran records, along with some marriages and burials from all denominations, have recently started showing up in FS's indexed records database. Coverage is ...spotty, and the Hungarian genealogical community is pretty well convinced that the indexing was done mostly by computer. (In any case, there has never been any sign of these registers in FS's Indexing section.)
For events after the start of civil registration (on 1 October 1895), the church registers are only available from the relevant diocese, if it has an e-research option, and has digitized the relevant registers. For Tolna county, the Roman Catholic diocese is Pécs, which does have (fee-based) online access (https://matricula.hu/pel). The Reformed church is way behind in the digital access department; only the easternmost church district (centered in Debrecen) has anything online. The Lutherans had a (fee-based) national database, but it was the victim of a hacker attack, and I don't know what sort of timeframe we're looking at for regaining access.
However, the civil registers have also been filmed/digitized by FS (https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/1452460), and some of them have recently been indexed -- again, possibly by computer. The indexes are often lacking location information -- that is, the "Event Place" is just "Hungary". You have to either check the image or look up the film number in the catalog to learn the actual place. (And the catalog doesn't know about the new indexes, since it has been locked and not updated for over two years now.)
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