Help with geography, maps, and counties

M. LynnBreyfogle

I would welcome suggestions, insight, resources, and maps for helping me to understand the organization of towns, counties, etc during the 1850s-1860s for the Abauj-Torna, Zemplen, and Borsod regions (northern Hungary/Slovakian boarder). I have family who lived in Garadna(n?) (where is this?)?

Where would I look for them in the 1857 or 1869 Census? https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog/results?count=20&placeId=94&query=%2Bplace%3AHungary&subjectsOpen=836327-50,837879-50

And what about in the Church records? https://www.familysearch.org/search/image/index?owc=9P33-RM4%3A107653801%3Fcc%3D1554443

Geography lesson, please!

Thank you!

Christopher Kovach_1

Prior to 1917, Garadna was in Abauj-Torna county, Szikso district, in Hungary.

Here is a link to a website showing the counties circa 1910, with links to maps of the individual counties:

http://lazarus.elte.hu/hun/maps/1910/vmlista.htm

A good site for maps:

https://dvhh.org/genealogy/1.files/maps/index.htm

Garadna residents were primarily Greek Catholics. Roman Catholics worshipped in Novaj, Lutherans in Hernad-Kercs, Reformed in Felso-Novaj and Jewish people in Hernad-Vecse. You can enter these placenames in Familysearches library catalog search to view the records.

After 1895, the government took over the administration of vital records.

I don't know about the Census.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

In the Kingdom of Hungary before 1 October 1895, vital records were the responsibility of churches. Each community had an assigned set of churches where births/baptisms, marriages, and deaths/burials were to be recorded, depending on the denomination of the people involved.

1 October 1895 was the start of civil registration. Churches generally continued to record sacraments in registers, of course, but these were no longer considered to be official government records, and more importantly to our purposes, in places that are still in Hungary, FamilySearch did not have permission to film them. In places that are now in Slovakia, the end date for filming varies greatly, but registers are never viewable online past a 100-year privacy cutoff (which often runs several years behind).

The questions of "where was the ___ church" and "where was the civil registry office" are answered using gazetteers.

Dvorzsák's gazetteer (1877) includes the 1869 census's population numbers, broken down by denomination. My usual starting point is the (English) tabular version that used to be on RadixHub (until they lost that domain) and is now on the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/web/20160327063819/http://www.radixhub.com/radixhub/gazetteers/1877). The page numbers in the tables link to the University of Pécs's scan (table of contents: https://kt.lib.pte.hu/cgi-bin/kt.cgi?konyvtar/kt03110501/tartalom.html); you just need to remove the archive.org part from the URL.

The other thing that the table links to (via the placename, using an intermediate overview page) is a summary of the 1913 gazetteer, amended with the modern name and country for the place. You can also generally extract this information from FamilySearch's Places database (https://www.familysearch.org/research/places/), but it can get a bit ambiguous, as the pre- and post-Trianon entries are not connected.

If I don't offhand know the county (because that particular tidbit hasn't stuck to my flypaper-brain), then I use the official gazetteers on the Central Statistics Office's site (https://www.kshkonyvtar.hu/article/56/959/helysegnevtarak). This was an early digitization project that uses various deprecated website tools (such as frames), meaning it hasn't worked right since IE, but the alphabetical index of places (betűrend szerinti helységnévmutató) generally works, so that's what I use. (Some of the later editions have nothing but that section.)

The 1913 edition is on the KSH site as a PDF; it's well over a thousand pages, so if you have Hungarian relatives, just download and save it. You'll use it again

For the location of a civil registry office, the abbreviation to look for in the (post-1895) gazetteers is _a.k._ (anyakönyv "vital register" [literally: "motherbook"]). _Helyben_ means "locally".

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For maps, I use a site that used to be Mapire and is now maps.arcanum.com. It overlays historical map data on top of modern maps, with transparency adjustable between 0 and 100%, and also allows side-by-side views of two different maps. If you type "Garadna" into the search field for the Third Military Survey map (https://maps.arcanum.com/hu/map/thirdsurvey25000), for example, you'll see that Garadna was just north of Felső-Novaj along a side-branch of the river Hernád, about 20 miles south of the city of Kassa. Bárcza was about 3 miles south of Kassa.

M. LynnBreyfogle

Thank you, both, for this helpful information!! This was amazing and provided me with the information I needed to track down an amazing number of people in Garadna! Thank you!