Uncovering My Hungarian Heritage
Hello everyone, my name is Ahmed. I'm on a heartfelt quest to trace my Hungarian roots. My grandmother, originally from Hungary, sought refuge in Tunisia during World War II, before marrying my grandfather and starting a family here. She bravely faced a death sentence back in Hungary for her efforts in aiding Jewish friends and others persecuted during the turbulent times. Sadly, she passed away long before I was born. My father and I are now committed to reconnecting with our Hungarian lineage. We have some key details like her name, birth date, birthplace, and former address in Hungary. Any guidance, tips, or information you could provide would be immensely appreciated. Your support in this personal journey means a lot to us. Thank you so much for your kindness and assistance.
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A lot depends on the specifics, especially of her birth date and birthplace.
If she was born less than a century ago, then you're not going to find anything about her birth anywhere online. That information is not public yet.
If she was born after 1895 but before the 1920s, then her birth registration may be available in FS's "Hungary Civil Registration" collection (https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/1452460). Coverage varies greatly by location; for example, places that fall within the post-1950 Pest county (which thankfully does not include the city of Budapest) do not have any civil registers online anywhere. The county did not participate in the contract with FS.
Quite a few of the civil registrations have now been indexed, and more of them show up every few months, so it's worthwhile to start with a search by name. If that doesn't turn up anything relevant, then you may just need to browse through some images. You can do that using the waypoints by clicking the "Browse..." button on the collection's landing page (linked above), or using the Catalog (https://www.familysearch.org/search/catalog). The latter is now over two years out of date, so it will not tell you about the recently-published indexes, but the scanning of the civil registers was completed a decade ago (or more), so (barring cataloging errors) the images are there if you search by placename.
You can find the location of the relevant civil registry office using a gazetteer. The Central Statistics Office has (ancient) digitized versions of the official pre-WWI ones (https://www.kshkonyvtar.hu/article/56/959/helysegnevtarak). The interface for all but the 1913 edition (which is a PDF that I recommend downloading and saving) dates from the days of Netscape and Internet Explorer; it uses frames and other now-obsolete web tools, so the navigation is mostly broken, but the alphabetical lists ("Betűrend szerinti helységnévmutató") thankfully still work.
Before civil registration (which began on 1 Oct 1895), official vital records in the Kingdom of Hungary were kept by churches. FamilySearch microfilmed (and then digitized) a lot of these, as part of a records-preservation contract with the Hungarian National Archives. (This contract is the explanation for the strict cutoff observable on the images: if a page has records dated after 30 Sep 1895, they're covered up.)
To find a church register entry, you need to know the religion/denomination and the location of the church. To answer "Where did they go to church?", use the gazetteers linked above, or Dvorzsák's. There's a handy English-language tabular version available using the Wayback Machine (because RadixHub lost its domain), and it links (after removal of the Wayback Machine's contribution to the URL) to the University of Pécs digital library's version.
The church registers do not form a waypointed collection on FS, but they can be found by searching the Catalog for the placename. The Roman Catholic and the Reformed (aka Calvinist) baptisms were indexed decades ago, and new indexes of other events and denominations keep (mysteriously) showing up every few months (despite being entirely absent from FS's Indexing section), so again, an initial search by name may prove fruitful.
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