IIGS™ Newsletter - May/June 1999
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IIGS™ Newsletter - May/June 1999
The IIGS Research Coordination Team (RCT) fields research questions on the IIGS-RCT mail list. Each month we try to publish a selected answer to a research question in the interest of helping many more genealogists.An RCT member provided this answer to a person seeking a birth certificate from Austria-Hungary:
The question: If I have a Date of Birth and the parents names of a person would I be able to get a birth certificate from Hungary. I do not know the name of the village or town, but the person emigrated from Austria-Hungary in 1893.You will have quite a number of problems finding information without a town. There are a number of avenues toward establishing the hometown. And - be careful not to limit your search - at various times, "Austria/Hungary" could have been most of Europe!
You need to ensure that you have all of the information you can glean from United States sources - which will help you to find the "right" families in Germany/Hungary.
You should be able to get death certificates ( and check local newspapers for an obituary). You should also look for the naturalization papers - there might well be clues in there.
If you have the 1900/1910/1920 census for this family, the question of when they arrived --and whether an individual has been naturalized-- is answered on the census form.
Census reports for 1900, 1910, 1920: Be sure to look for other immigrants nearby and for people who moved from place to place with them. You might catch a break and find grandma or sister-in-law living with them.
The state in which your family lived may also have a state census. Check the USGenweb pages for the state in which you are interested.
Passenger lists also are an invaluable tool. You do not say where the family lived, so I cannot guess at the arrival port.
If they arrived in New York, then you must rely on published books to find your immigrant because 1893 is not an indexed year for New York. If San Francisco, California is a possible entry, then you are more fortunate.
All of the above resources and/or indices to those resources, can be found on microfilm at your local Family History Center (FHC). Or you can write the county clerks' offices in each of those counties - except for the census, of course.
Have you been to the FHC? At your local FHC is an amazing number of microfilms and databases for German researches.
You will find the IGI (International Genealogical Index) and many microfilmed German church records, court records, military - quite a haul.
Wandering through the IGI and the church records may also give you a better feel for the various spellings of the name.
The German genealogy site has a number of excellent FAQ's:
http://www.genealogy.net/Additionally, you may find something of interest at
http://feefhs.org/ethnic.htmlThere is an impressive array of German and Hungarian research sources there.
You might like Adalbert Goertz's FAQ at
http://www3.adnc.com/~lynnd/gfaqj.htmlHave you sent queries to soc.genealogy.german?
Have you joined the Hungarian and Slavik mail lists? You may find descriptions of them, as well as instructions how to subscribe, at http://www.rootsweb.com/~maillist/
Good luck!