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Table of contents

BOOK 1

Introduction
  1. How the project began
  2. How the research was done
  3. General observations about our ancestors
  4. Various ancestral statistics and information
  5. Description of the structure and contents of the report
  6. Acknowledgements
Genealogy Report
  Family photographs
  Generation 1-26
  Index of names of direct ancestors
  Appendix 'A', Family Tree, 1-26 generation

BOOK 2

Foreword
Appendix 'B' Church Records
Names of individuals A-G
Names of individuals H-M
Names of individuals N-Sch
Names of individuals S-Z
Appendix 'C' Signatures & Mementoes
Signature Collection
Data Source Mementoes

BOOK 3

Appendix 'D', Biographies
Appendix 'E', Family Histories
Appendix 'F', Research Data Tables

BOOK 4

Appendix 'G', Translations of archival documents
Foreword
Archival Documents with names A - M
Archival Documents with names N - Z
Appendix 'H', Maps of genealogical sites

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Introduction

How the research began I retired from gainful employment in August 1994; I was 62 years old. My wife Eva and I had great plans. We had sold our house in the Winchester suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, put the money in the bank and flew to Geneva in Switzerland, where our daughter, Catherine lived with her family. We bought a small E290 Mercedes and using her home as a base, we planned to travel to all parts of Europe and North Africa. Our first trip was to Budapest to visit Eva's mother and to straighten out the problem she was having with her so-called caretaker. She had a contract with a young woman to take care of her to the end of her life, at which time the caretaker would inherit her apartment in compensation for her services. A problem had developed with the caretaking and we figured that we would have to stay perhaps a month to deal with that problem, and we would leave Budapest in October. Little did we know that we would be tied up there with my mother-in-law's caretaker problem for three long years and practically nothing would materialize of our great plans of traveling around in Europe. We were forced to stay with Eva's mother for seven to eight months in each of those years to take care of her and to look after the lawsuit we were forced into against her caretaker.

As a way to spend my time, I decided to find out the whereabouts of the two brothers and one sister of my father, who may have been still alive. I started out with the sister, Mária, who was the youngest of those siblings. I knew her address in Buda (BP XI, Bercsényi utca 32a), where she used to live years earlier. It was a modern apartment building on a street off Bartók Béla avenue only a couple of blocks west from the Gellért Hotel. Visiting the address, I found her name in the lobby of the building. That seemed like a good sign, but there was no answer to the bell. After several attempts I decided to try again another day - and left. A couple of days later, my wife and I went there again, but still no one answered the bell. As we were about to leave, one of the residents arrived into the lobby and asked us whom we were looking for. We explained to her, what we were trying to do and she invited us to her apartment on an upper floor. Apparently, she was a good friend of my aunt and she told us a few sad details of the last year or months of my aunt's life. We found out from her that my aunt had died a little over a year earlier. In her last years, she was getting very senile, hiding money all over her apartment, where later she could not find it. On several occasions the police brought her home from the streets, where she wondered around in her nightgown. One winter night, wearing a thin housecoat she went to Ménesi utca 70, which was about a mile from her home, and kept pressing the bell (her neighbor did not know it, but I knew that this was the house she was born in and lived for some years). This was not the first time she did that. The owners called the police, who already knew her and took the half frozen 83-year old woman right away to a hospital. She died there a week later from complications arising from pneumonia. Her niece inherited the apartment, but sold it not long before we got there and the new owner had not taken possession of it yet, neither had he changed the name on the resident list. I knew that the 'niece' had to be Rozi, my only cousin on my father's side, whom I had not seen in 50 years. The lady knew that she was married, but did not know her married name or her address. I decided to find her. I went to the City Hall of District XI in Buda, where my aunt died. From there I was sent to District I, also in Buda, which was her birthplace, where her vital data are kept. There I found out that the office had all the information about my aunt and about her estate, but it was against the law to give me the name or address of her heir (who, I assumed to be my cousin, Rozi). Instead, they offered to have the heir contact me if he or she wanted to. I gave the office my address and waited. Two weeks later I received a note in the mail from my cousin Rozi, and eventually we met in her home in Pest. At that meeting, I found out that she and I were the last living members of my father's Vitzthum family. We spent a pleasant evening and reminisced looking at some old photographs and some old documents. One of the documents was the extract of a death record from a church in the Tabán, a section of Buda. My cousin said it was the death record of the grandfather of our grandmother. According to the record he had been a master cooper by trade and died in 1882 at the age of 91. Wow, I was excited by that. I knew my aunts, uncles, and grandparents - nothing more. I had never heard about a relative that was born as far back as 1791, and here he was my father's great-grandfather born in that year. It seemed unreal to look through a crack and see that far back into my family's dim past. I was fascinated. One note on the death record said: "Buda, St. Anna". What did that mean? My cousin did not know. This experience greatly aroused my interest in my parents' families, about whom I knew so little. I subsequently visited the Capital Library and looked up the 'Name and Address Books', which were published annually in Budapest from about 1867 to 1944. I went through them and discovered many pieces of information about my grandparents and great grandparents, both maternal and paternal - and it was so easy. In particular, I found out that my 'master cooper' great-great-grandfather had a business in the Tabán and so did his brother and two sons. I felt a need to find out more about him. I went to a roman catholic church and asked the priest what the note "Buda, St. Anna" meant. He looked at me and politely said: "he was baptized or belonged to the church of St. Anna in Buda". I was from the Pest side of the river Danube and rarely went to Buda except to visit my grandmother and my two aunts. Besides, I was Lutheran and did not even know the Lutheran churches let alone the Catholic ones. Where was the St. Anna church? I found out that it was in the Viziváros section of District I. I lived all my life in Budapest, but never heard about either the Viziváros or the St. Anna church, which was the oldest church in Budapest. That tells one something about the cultural deprivation of the war-years and the aftermath, in which I grew up. Viziváros was adjacent to the Tabán, which I was vaguely familiar with since I had heard over the years that my father, some of his siblings as well as his parents had been born and raised in the Tabán. Besides, it used to be the most romantic place in Budapest - even songs were written and sung about it. Interestingly, even Semmelweiss doctor, the discoverer of the cause of puerperal fever (which caused mothers to die in childbirth) lived in the Tabán (his house still stands and is a national monument today; I did not know that while I lived in Budapest). I visited the St. Anna church to look up the church book of 1791 to see my paternal great-great-grandfather's birth record. I am not sure now why I wanted to see it and I was probably not sure at that time 15 years ago either. I met a young priest, who told me that only the parish priest could show me the book and he was not there. I went back a week later and got the same answer from the same young priest. When history repeated itself again another week later, I must have shown some sign of impatience and noticing it, the young priest asked me why I was not going to the National Archive on Castle Hill, where I could view the pages of the same church book on microfilm. Of course the answer was that I had no idea that Hungarian church books had been micro-filmed. I thanked him and quietly wondered what kind of a mean spirited or dumb priest he was, not to have told me that on one of my previous visits. I went and found the National Archive on the top of Castle Hill. It was surrounded by historical buildings. I was immediately awed by the whole area. When I last lived in the city, 13 years after WW II, most of Castle Hill was inaccessible, as much of it was still severely damaged. In 1996, forty years later it was all open and restored, some of it impressively. When I stood in front of the National Archive, for the first time in my life, I saw a dark, ornate, late-19th century, baroque, four-story building overlooking a small square. The two streets leading into the square were lined by reasonably well restored two-story row houses of wealthy burghers of the mid-18th century. They were still residential buildings. Across from the archive's baroque edifice stood in stark contrast the plain, puritan edifice of the German Lutheran church, where my father and my grandfather were baptized and where my grandfather and great-grandfather were married. It still gives church service on every Sunday in the German language as it did in my great-grandfather's time. Not more than a couple of blocks away stood once the famous Szilágyi Erzsébet Lyceum, where my above mentioned aunt Mária and her sister Lujza studied and graduated in 1910s and 1920s. For eight years, they walked up to that school on Castle Hill from the Tabán, which is at the foot of the hill by the river Danube. They were Roman Catholic by religion and they were baptized in the St. Katalina church in the Tabán. Unfortunately, the Szilágyi Erzsébet Lyceum was no longer there. In the 1970s, so-called progress required the most famous Lyceum of Pest-Buda to yield its place to a Hilton Hotel. In that little square by the National Archive, I immediately felt a sense of belonging I had probably never felt before. Going inside the archive building, I found an aura of old fashioned scholarship of the type one reads about in historical novels. Granite stairs, worn concave over a hundred years by scholars, were leading to the upper floors, where there were spacious reading rooms with large ornate windows all along one side and floor-to-ceiling glassed book cases along the other. The furniture was antiquated looking dark; large tables and arm chairs around them, all of carved polished wood. There were scholarly looking people, young and old, sitting at those tables full of bundles of folded old brownish-yellowish looking manuscripts with crumbling edges. They were leafing through or poring over some folios of those manuscripts. I had never been in an archive - the whole experience had an eerie effect on me. I eventually found the section of the archive, where the micro-filmed church books could be viewed. It looked quite different from the rest of the archive. It was furnished in a more modern style and the dozen American made micro-film readers gave it a high-technology air. I obtained the required permit for the use of the archive. Trying to find the 1791 birth record of my father's maternal greatgreat- grandfather, I discovered that it was not available because that church book was damaged in a great Danube flood in the 19th century. I decided to look for the birth record of my father's paternal grandfather. I managed to get my first roll of micro-film of a church book of the German Lutheran church in Pozsony, where my Vitzthum great-grandfather was baptized. I found his birth record and those of his several siblings. It was an exciting experience and I enjoyed researching the past and the challenges it represented. I think the aura of that whole place, inside as well as outside, played a great role. The other researchers were mostly scholarly type of people, who could read German and Latin texts; they were familiar with the reference and supporting materials on the shelves of genealogical archive and knew how to use them. I and perhaps two other people were the only 'beginners' of the two dozen people I met in the research room that day. I was impressed and eager to do some more research the next day. As everybody I ever met there told me "starting genealogical research is easy, but few people can stop or finish it." I was hooked on the first day and I am still researching today, 17 years later.

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