Linking a dead young woman with her parents

LegacyUser

Paul Gardner said: The death record of Frida/Friderike Badrian in Budapest Hungary helped to answer a long-standing puzzle about a distant relative of mine. The listing of her parents' names in the Hungarian civil record (not shown in the earlier-seen hospital record) allowed for this closure. The transcription contains some understandable minor errors. Her official name was Frieda Badrian, and she was born in Beuthen (Germany), the daughter of Leopold [not Lipot] and Lucie [not Lurie] Durra. She was born on 11 January 1904, so her age at death was actually 34, not 33.
(Dr) Paul Gardner AM, Melbourne, Australia, 8 Sep 2020

LegacyUser

Paul Gardner said: Just for clarity: .. the daughter of Leopold and Lucie Badrian (nee Durra)
PLG

LegacyUser

Juli said: The Hungary Civil Registrations index on FS is not coughing up this record. Did you find it by browsing through the images, or did you use MACSE's index?

Ah, yes, it's on MACSE.


You can click _javítási javaslat_ ("suggest a correction") at the bottom right to get "Lurie" corrected, but everything else in the index is exactly correct: that's what the record says. In fact, I would argue that even Lurie is correctly indexed: that doesn't look at all like a 'c'.

https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/619...

Keep in mind that indexes are not records. They're finding aids for the records, and whatever its imperfections in transcription, if you found the record, then the index did its job perfectly.

LegacyUser

Juli said: (Note that Lipót and Leopold are exactly the same thing, just in different languages. A Hungarian civil registration record will naturally use Lipót, since the rule was to fill it out in Hungarian.)

LegacyUser

Paul Gardner said: Hi Juli
I fully understand that a summary of a record should state precisely what the record says. I don't have a problem with that.

My interest as a genealogy researcher is to get at the truth as far as possible. Two years ago, I saw the hospital record of Frida's death, which said that she came from Bojte. There is no such village in Hungary, but it's a common Hungarian surname, so when the terminally ill Frida said she was from Beuthen (in Germany), the hospital staffer wrote down Bojte. I thought at the time that it might have referred to Beuthen. But it wasn't until someone recently sent me a copy of the summary of the Hungarian civil record and the Family Search reference that I finally obtained the listing of Frida's parents, which removed any doubt about her identity.

Surely the answer to the dilemma of record indexing is obvious. The summary of the original record should say precisely what the record says. Yes, it says the mother's name was Lurie Durra. Maybe Frida said her mother was Lucie and the staffer wrote down Lucie with a mis-shapen c that looks like an r.

But that wouldn't help a researcher looking for information about Lucie Durra on the web.

And while Lipot is a perfectly spelled version of a Hungarian name, Frieda's father was German and was called Leopold. A web search for Leopold would not turn up Lipot as a hit. But it would if my note was added to the record information. Note: added to, not replace.

All that's needed is an additional line, perhaps labelled "Research Note" stating that later research has shown that Frida was named Frieda, that she was born in Beuthen, Upper Silesia, Germany, on 11 January 1904 and was the daughter of Leopold and Lucie Badrian. She was 34 years old when she died.

In other words, let's add to the record, rather than correcting the original.

(Dr) Paul Gardner

LegacyUser

Juli said: Paul, except there isn't a record to be added to, or not on FS. All that's on FS is the image of the civil register entry, or more precisely, the image of the archive copy of the civil register entry. Whether a search for Leopold would turn up Lipót or not is totally a moot question, as no search by name will turn up an unindexed image.

A good genealogical search engine will return Lipót when searching for Leopold, and Sándor for Alexander, István for Steven and Stephen, Imre for Emeric(us), and possibly even Janka and Hani for Johanna. I don't know where FS's algorithm currently falls on these particular names.