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Old Days
Some glimpses of the generations gone before us. . .
This page features part of the story of the Slovak branch of our roots
E-mail me if you would like to compare notes on any of these lines.
Update Sept. 4, 2000: If you, too have family from the Slovak towns of Jaklovce, Margecany, Vel'ky Folkmar, and Hutta, you may want to click here to check my index, of sorts, to people who were members of the Roman Catholic parish at Jaklovce, serving those towns, in the years 1800 to 1934 -- that page is under construction -- come and check it today, and bookmark it and stop back from time to time to get more info, or e-mail me with specific, basic requests regarding people known to have come from those villages
The Family of Emrich and Barbara [Hricko] Belensky -- Margecany, Spis, Slovakia to Taylor, Lackawanna County, PA
In 1987, Fran's paternal grandmother, Barbara [Belensky] Kardos,
passed away. At that time, as one of the older members of the young-adult
generation of Barbara's grandchildren, Fran decided to prepare a binder recording
the family history and genealogy, lest the details of past generations be
forgotten. Fran's father, uncles and aunts contributed their memories
and information on family births, marriages, deaths and the like. In time,
her father's cousins had material to offer, and an aunt found and gave her
many old photos.
A cousin from Fran's mother's side, Robert Arthur, was well-versed in family tree research and organizing genealogical data. He taught Fran a great deal about the sources of information which are available for working on one's family tree and how to use them. In a letter, Bob mentioned to Fran that he had had success discovering more about his wife's eastern European heritage by accessing the microfilmed records of her ancestral homeland from the LDS. The LDS (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, commonly known as the Mormons) had undertaken the archiving of vital records from all over the world. Civil and church records were becoming available which would let people in other countries, such as the U.S.A., view records they had previously been unable to look at without making a trip to the old country.
Fran's aunts told her that her grandmother had come from Margecany, Slovakia as a young girl with her parents and siblings. They lived in a couple of different towns outside Scranton, Pennsylvania, before making a permanent home in Taylor, PA. Grandma was said to have been born December 2nd, 1895 in Margecany, to Emrich and Barbara (Hricko) Belensky. Emrich had been born there as well, on May 9, 1859, and his wife, about 1863.
Prepared with only this much to go on, Fran went to the LDS Family History Center closest to her home in April 1996. A Family History Center is a facility that's part of a local Mormon church, in which persons of any faith denomination are free to come and research their family trees. Some resources are available at no cost, while others are offered at a rather modest rental fee for use on the FHC premises. The helpful staff at the FHC guided Fran to the microfiched index to materials which can be borrowed from the LDS main archive in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Thus began a tremendous learning experience, one that was to change her life. She ordered the microfilm said to contain the parish roster of the Roman Catholic Church of Jaklovce, Slovakia. In her grandmother's youth -- in fact, until about 1930 -- Margecany had no church of its own, and local worshippers went to Mass in this neighboring village; its church served several area villages. (It is said that in the ensuing years, the path or size of a nearby river has changed, or has been changed, and the old church and Fran's ancestors' homes are now under water.) The staff told Fran that what present-day Americans know as Slovakia or the Slovak Republic, which was referred to as Czechoslovakia decades ago, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in generations past. Her ancestors' birthplaces were considered part of Hungary during the period covered by the parish roster. Margecany had been known as Margitfalva or Margitfalu; the former name of Jaklovce was Jekelfalva; that region of Slovakia, now called Spis, was known as Szepes, Hungary. Roman Catholic records were usually kept in Latin, as they were world-wide in those days; some decades, the use of Hungarian was substituted.
The country was rather poor economically. The society virtually had no written Slovak language, and most people had little formal education. The majority of the citizens worked the land, and a few practiced trades. Most lived the simplest of lives as serfs to the Hungarian rulers and land barons. With memories of several Easters and weeks during summers of her younger years spent visiting her grandparents, Fran sent for the microfilm recording the parish roster of old Jaklovce and Margecany. A fee of $3.25 would let her use the film for research in the LDS FHC for a few weeks. She could renew the film for a time as well.
In a couple of weeks, the film arrived from Salt Lake City. The staff at the local FHC taught Fran to use microfilm on one of their several microfilm-reader machines; this skill isn't difficult, but she hadn't used microfilm much before, and that, years before. The FHC catalog had said four rolls of film in the LDS archives dealt with the Jaklovce parish. Fran had ordered the ones covering the years from the early 1700s to 1920, films numbered 1739208 and 1739209, knowing that sound family tree research method means working back from the known to the unknown. Tracing from her grandmother back to earlier generations would yield much more understandable results than randomly recording any data on persons of her surnames many years before her grandmother, without having verified any connections.
Fran and the staff member got the film ready and turned on the machine, ready to crank ahead from the beginning of the film to the year in which she'd find her grandmother's baptism . She felt a new gratitude to her parents for making her take Latin back in high school, and to Mr. Anthony Conte, the Latin teacher whose efforts she hadn't much appreciated while taking his course for two years. The film was arranged in blocks covering several decades each, for a given event in the congregation's faith life. One could read a generation of baptisms, then turn to a generation of marriages, and go on to several years of death records.
As the scribe's writing appeared before her, Fran was awed. She had not yet wound the film far enough forward to locate her grandmother's era, and her eye first fell on baptisms recorded in the early 1700s. Yes, they were in Latin, in pen and ink; possibly nib-pen, maybe even quill pen. And there, over two hundred years before the times Grandma would introduce Fran to a neighbor with Margecany roots, or mention another such friend to Fran's father, or greet such a person at church, were the family names of those people! No, not people Fran knew well; but, she recognized, that was the surname of the man three houses up from Grandma; there, the name matched that fellow who had worked with Grandpa in the coal mine. Americanize that spelling, and it sure looked like the name of a parishoner Grandma often said had been asking after our family, recalling my Dad from his youth in Taylor; and this one matched the name on the gravestone next to great-grandpa Emrich's up behind the church! It looked like the ancestors of many present day residents of Taylor, Pennsylvania, had come from the three or four towns from which the people came to worship at Jaklovce so many years ago! Some have termed this phenomenon, not an uncommon one as the U.S. was being settled by people from other lands, a "chain migration."
Fran learned some basics of Slovak pronunciation, from her father and from others searching their Slovak roots on the Internet. In "Emrich", the "ch" is like "k". In most words, "j" is pronounced like "y". Now and then, a "j" is written where one would expect an "i"; "j", "y" and "i" are used almost interchangeably. "Hr" might be pronounced like "gr". "C" and "ck" are rather like "ts", and "s" can be "sh", especially if it is seen with a hacek (an accent, or diacritic mark, resembling a v) shown atop the "s". This sort of thing can lead to the spelling changes which turn up from one record to another, or when the family emigrates and settles in a new land. For example, another Slovak branch of our family has seen their name spelled Simko and Shimko; Hricko, the spelling our family used, has been seen written as Hritsko. (Click here to go to http://www.slovak.com/language/index.html , a web site offering an excellent elementary introduction to Slovak pronunciation and common phrases.)
Fran located the baptismal entry in the roster for her grandmother. In the late 1800s, the roster tells each child's date of birth, of baptism, first name, whether a legitimate child or not, names and towns of residence of parents, their denomination and occupation, house number (which was about as much of an address as a family had or needed, in a small rural town), godparents' names, their denominations, towns and occupation, name of priest, and sometimes notes, such as date of death later recorded. The information matched what the family had already known; it was Grandma Barbara, there as a newborn!
Then Fran went back to the time she supposed Emrich and Barbara had married, to the marriages section of the roster. There was their previously unknown wedding date: November 12, 1883. As she got acquainted with the parish roster in depth over the ensuing months, Fran saw that November weddings were very popular. Apparently, it seemed an appropriate time to those people, after the harvest was in, but before the dead of winter and the more somber holy season of Advent (no marriages permitted during Advent in those days). The marriage entries give similar types of information to that above, and sometimes the spouses' ages, names of their parents and of the marriage witnesses (who were often both men), and whether the spouses had been widowed or were never married before. In such a small town, perhaps there was not much of a selection of eligible spouses; quite a number of marriages followed a couple's getting a dispensation because of being cousins of a sort! Eventually, marriages had taken place which linked most area families to most other nearby families. Some people are related to a given family on both their mother's and father's side.
Noting the ages at marriage of Emrich and Barbara, Fran was able to backtrack to THEIR baptismal records: Emrich, as the family had said, on May 9, 1859, and Barbara on April 11, 1863. For each of these infants, at their baptism, the roster listed names of the parents. Fran's present day family members had not known even their names, but the couples were found to be Andrew and Elizabeth (Kalavsky) Belensky, and Thomas and Maria (Maczko) Hricko. Fran made her way back in time a few years from Emrich's birth and from Barbara's, to find THEIR parents' marriage records. There, finding the ages at marriage recorded for Andrew and for Elizabeth, for Thomas and Maria, and THEIR parents' names, she could estimate the years in which to look for births of Andrew and Elizabeth, of Thomas and Maria.
In this way, she likewise followed each line as far back as she could, until she reached, on several branches, her 6-greats and 7-greats grandparents! She extrapolated some of the earliest people's dates of birth, from their reported date of and age at marriage or death; her 7-greats grandfather Martin Roskovansky was born about 1686!
She worked on recording what she found about her family on the Jaklovce film on and off for nearly two years, and discovered information about her Margecany-born relatives (her dad's mother's side) more easily than she has been able to trace her Dad's father's side since their arrival in the U.S.A.!
This is a retouched scan of a photocopy of the left-hand page of the parish roster, from microfilm, listing the baptism of Fran's great grandfather Emrich Belensky in Jaklovce, Slovakia, in 1859. The line just above this caption lists his information: Baptismal entry #45 for the year, date of birth 9 May, date of baptism 10 May, baptismal name in Latin Emericus, male, legitimate. The bottom line on the scan below tells more about him:
It
reads: Andreas Belenszky colonus rom Cath Elizabetha
Kalyavszky rom Cath / Margitfalva #66 / Michael Maczko colon.
rom Cath Maria Fotta rom Cath Georgius
Oravecz, parochus, Jekelfalva.
It translates to: infant's parents are Andrew Belensky, farmer, Roman Catholic, and Elizabeth née Kalyavsky, R.C.; home address is Margecany, house #66; godparents are Michael Macko, a farmer, R.C., and Maria Fotta, R.C.; baptized by George Oravecz, pastor, church at town of Jekelfalva. The LDS, strictly speaking, reserves all rights to its microfilmed records, and they are not to be sold or published without authorization, but are made available for a researcher's personal use only. These scans are shown for illustrative purposes only.
Fran learned about Margecany little by little. She went over the roster repeatedly, the easily legible sections and the very trying passages, and corresponded with several relatives and some unrelated people on the 'net (or occasionally, by mail) who had Margecany roots. Some have sent her lovely maps of and brief paragraphs on the town. She obtained some maps and information by mail from Omega Translation Service, in Iowa, which she had seen advertised in The Genealogical Helper magazine.
Hope to see you here again soon! Thanks for
being one of the
visitors to this feature since April 10, 1999
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