Last names

marygulish

Hello been off awhile. My father`s side will be very hard to research for sure. Has any one come across these names. This is how the Gulish name has been spelled in the past. My uncle came to US and dropped the o which at the time was Ghoulish to Gulish. Some still spell it with the O some do not. But here are a few speelings.

. Gulya, Gula, Gulla,Gulyas, Ghoulish Ghoul Gulish )  Just wondering if any member came across any of these names. It is hard for me my grandparents came to the USA in the 1920`s and my grandmothers village from what I understand was destroyed during a war so any birth or any records could of been lost.

Thank you

Julia Szent-Györgyi

Gulyás "cattle-herder" is a not-uncommon Hungarian family name. It's pronounced [very] roughly /GOO yowsh/ (second syllable kinda like "yowl" with /sh/ instead of the L). In a list of the names of all 10,162,610 Hungarian citizens in 2007, the spelling Gulyás occurred 20,133 times, and the following variations had at least ten occurrences each: Gujás, Gulás, Guljas, Guljás, Gulyas, Gullyás, Guias. (My closest personal association was Gulyás Kató néni ["auntie Katie Gulyás"] who always had her hair exactly just so, exactly the same; I was in my late teens when I realized that it was a wig.)

Gulya "herd of cattle" is considerably less common as a surname, but it does occur. Gula and Guja are variant spellings.

The similar-looking Gyula is an old native personal name that became the name of several different towns; it occurs very occasionally in this unmarked form as a surname, but it's much more common as Gyulai "of/from Gyula". (The latter had 3084 occurrences in 2007 for all variants combined.)

The -lis(h) variations are possibly a different name from a different language that became associated with Gulyás based on sound and familiarity. In the reverse index to the Hungarian surname dictionary, the only names that end in -lis are Kalis, Pális, Vitális, Bartalis, Bertalis, Ilís, Kilís, and Pilis, and the only names beginning with G- that end in -is are Golyóbis, Gyenis, and Gábris. There are no Hungarian surnames that end in -sh (unless they've been Americanized).

I went looking and found a list of eight villages in Zemplén county that were partially or fully destroyed by cannon fire in WWI, and half of them have church registers available on FamilySearch, and the other half didn't have a church. By the 20th century, there was quite a bit of redundancy built into recordkeeping. Yes, sometimes that wasn't enough, but don't stop looking because of family stories — sometimes, they're just coverups for laziness or frustration.