A documented reconstruction of the Hungarian and Transylvanian lines of my family, built from the records rather than from the stories — though the stories are kept too, and labelled as such.
Scope
Parish registers, civil registration, census and land records, emigration and naturalisation papers, military records, and what survived in the family's own hands — photographs, letters, documents carried across and then put in a drawer for eighty years.
The aim is a single printed volume that can sit on a shelf and be consulted, not a tree on someone else's website that disappears when the subscription does.
Standard of evidence
A name enters the archive when a record puts it there. An inference is written as an inference, with the reasoning shown, so that a later reader can disagree with me on the evidence rather than on my authority.
Where two records conflict, both are printed. Where a line runs out, the page says it runs out. Genealogy goes wrong when a plausible connection is allowed to harden quietly into a fact.
The most useful thing an archive can record is the shape of what it does not know.
The documents
Some of what the archive holds is worth printing whole rather than summarising. The first of those is here.
Édes kis Gyurikám — the life story of Irma Szilágyi, written for a grandson who had asked her for it. It runs from her birth in a snowbound village in March 1895 to the family's arrival in the United States on 21 December 1956: the Romanian cavalry at Mezőtelegd, the cellars under Budapest, and eight kilometres of snow to the Austrian border. She was my second great-grandmother.
Printed complete, in translation, with the original Hungarian alongside it and the eight sheets of the typescript shown as they stand. The grandson she wrote it to has not been identified; the page sets out what is known about him, in case somebody recognises him.
If we are related
If you are working on the same families, or hold papers, photographs, or recollections that bear on them, I would like to hear from you — including, and especially, if you think something here is wrong.