HUNGARIAN STUDIES YEARBOOK 2020 (II) DOI: 10.2478/HSY-2020–0006 Digital Genealogy From personal histories to settlements history1 Anna FENYVESI Institute of English and American Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary; e-mail: [email protected] ABSTRACT: This paper demonstrates how methods of digital genealogy can be used to trace per- sonal histories in innovative ways to uncover potentially significant details of settle- ment history where information in historical sources is scarce. It uses the example of a mid-18th century Roman Catholic settler and his family in Szentes, a small town on the Great Hungarian Plain, at a time when mass migration into this region was happening from overpopulated regions of the Kingdom of Hungary. Records of the settlement history of the town are meagre at best, but this important aspect of social history can be supplemented through meticulous research into the Family Search genealogy database. Keywords: digital genealogy, migration, settlement history, Hungary, 18th century, Szentes. 1. Introduction The use of digital methodologies has opened up new perspectives in many branches of the humanities and social sciences, making possible research that would have been impossible previously. The same is true of genealogical research, which has become fundamentally transformed by the innovative means of researching in online databases, allowing keyword searches as well as access to vast repositories of records from a multitude of places all in the same database. 1 Dedicated to the memory of my grandmother, Erzsébet Aradi (1909–1996). I want to thank my colleagues at the University of Szeged, ethnographer László Mód, for his generous advice, suggestions, and help regarding ethnography in general and ethnographic literature in particular, as well as historian Hajnalka Tóth, for numerous discussions of 18th century Hungary in the past year and a half. I greatly appreciate archivist Edit Takács’s assistance in providing feedback on the earlier version of this paper and her gracious encouragement of my work. I am thankful to Ralph Reindler for meticulously and lovingly perfecting the English of this paper. Any errors or shortcomings are entirely my own responsibility. © 2020 Anna FENYVESI. This is an open access article licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/) 75 Hungarian Studies Yerabook The best known such database is the Family Search database made available by the eponymous nonprofit organization and website (famil- ysearch.org) operated by the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter-day Saints (informally known as the Mormon Church) in the United States. After free registration, the website provides access to 8 billion names, 3.2 billion digital images, and 490,000 digital books compiled on the website.2 From the point of view of genealogical research, probably the most important sources are the digitized copies of church and civil reg- isters of births, marriages and deaths collected at the site. The records for present-day Hungary3 are available fully for the church registers, and partially for the civil registers, kept since October 1896 in Hungary, with the period of accessibility varying from place to place. This allows for genealogical inquiry unhampered by traditional limitations of ge- nealogical research ranging from the trivial (such as the opening times of archives) to the complex (such as searching for larger geographical territories like counties or whole regions and longer time spans). Genealogical research unbounded by geography and time can pro- vide much farther reaching results than traditional, pre-digital research, and, as I will argue below, can also yield information that opens up new vistas in settlement history research where traditional sources and exact information are missing, as is the case, for instance, with the 18th century repopulation of a number of towns on the Great Hungarian Plain. Meticulous use of and search in the church registers can provide all-important details that will reveal a bigger picture like the tiles of a mosaic. In this paper, I aim to show, through the example of the earliest known paternal ancestor of my own paternal grandmother and his fam- ily, who were among the earliest Roman Catholic families to settle in the town of Szentes, how tracing the personal histories of 18th century Hungarian peasant settlers can contribute to and shape our under- standing of processes of settlement history otherwise lacking historical documentation. 2. Historical background As a result of over 150 years of the Ottoman Turkish occupation of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary between 1541 and 1699, the area of the Great Hungarian Plain, which was under direct Ottoman con- trol, became largely depopulated through continuous warring and the subsequent flight of the local populations. Finally, under the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, the Ottomans ceded much of the area occupied by them to the Habsburgs, and the Great Hungarian Plain also became 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FamilySearch; date of access: October 23, 2020. 3 The availability of the records varies from country to country, e.g. records for present-day Hungary and Slovakia are amply available, whereas those for pres- ent-day Romania are not. 76 Digital Genealogy part of the Habsburg Empire like northern and western Hungary beforehand. The Great Plain contained most of Hungary’s arable land, which was largely unused by the 18th century, and thus became an inviting destination for peasants in the fairly overpopulated northern region of Hungary and Transylvania, for ethnic Hungarians and minorities alike. In numerous instances, the new landlords, many of them granted land by the Habsburg court, organized the settling of German-speaking set- tlers from Austria, Southern Germany, and Saxony on their new lands. In the course of the 18th century, migration of massive proportions, aided by a six-year tax exemption for new settlers under Law 103 of 1723, brought thousands of people to the Great Plain, more than dou- bling the population of the country to around 9.5 million by the late 18th century. The town of Szentes, a few kilometers east of the Tisza river and about 50 kilometers north of Szeged, was settled from the early mid- dle ages, and first mentioned in a charter in 1332 (Labádi 2003: 10), and gaining the designation of a market town (oppidum in Latin, mezőváros in Hungarian) in 1564 (Labádi 2003: 14). The population of the town converted to Calvinist Protestantism at the very begin- ning of the Reformation, in the 1540s (Labádi 2003: 13). Szentes un- derwent considerable growth in its population in the 18th century as a result of the sociohistorical processes discussed above. In addition, the town found itself in a favorable economic position in the 1710s, when it was made the center for the distribution of provisions for the Habsburg forces that were still engaged in keeping the Ottoman Turks out of southern Hungary. The 1715 census of population recorded 230 families, estimated to total about 1,380 people (Sima 1914: 189), all of them peasants, and all of them Calvinist Protestants. By 1759 the town’s population totaled 7,503 people, 5,883 of them Calvinists and 1,620 Roman Catholics (Kováts 1928: 260). Historical sources do not offer much information on where the new settlers of the town came from in the 18th century, especially what the source of the town’s new Roman Catholic population was. In connec- tion with the latter, László Sima’s 1914 history of Szentes mentions only that the settlement of the first group of Catholics was initiated by Franz Dominik Harruckern (1696–1775) after he became the landlord of the town following the death of his father in 1742: “they were of German origin, primarily craftsmen” (Sima 1914: 226; my translation), differing from the local Hungarian Calvinist peasant population in their moth- er tongue, religion, and way of life. Allegedly, they did not like the marshy local air either and soon turned their backs on Szentes. After that, Hungarian Catholics settled in the town: “the settling of migrants from the foothills of the Mátra mountains was much more successful, they were hard-working and thrifty, excellent Roman Catholic people” (Nagy 1928: 91; my translation). There is no information on where ex- actly these Hungarian speaking Roman Catholics came from or how, 77 Hungarian Studies Yerabook i.e. in an organized fashion, in larger groups or in smaller family units. The “Migration” chapter of the eight volume series Magyar néprajz [Hungarian ethnography] argues that peasants – essentially, serfs in Hungary at the time – migrated in family units: “Perpetual serfs had to flee, and they risked that their landlord would find them and have them brought back. Their basic interest and instinctive conspiracy prevailed when no more than a few families left a village at the same time, and even they did not stick together. The fear of being forced back then explains that settlers, who became ‘serfs free to move’4 on the land of their new landlord, rarely settled for good at the first place they ended up in. Moving several times diminished the chance of the fugitives being found.” (Sárkány and Szilágyi 1988–2002: 832, my translation) As we will see, the principles of moving in family units and moving several times prevails in the case study under discussion as well (supple- mented with occasional personal motivation). As for the geographical origin of the Hungarian speaking Roman Catholics of Szentes, the only pointer is the above-mentioned phrase “from the foothills of the Mátra mountains” (mátraaljáról, in the Hungarian original). The designationmátraalja refers to the south- ern foothills of the Mátra, a mountain range of the North Hungarian Mountains, a roughly rectangular area about 50 kilometers east to west, from Eger to Gyöngyös, and about 30 kilometers to the south of this line.