{"id":7662,"date":"2019-01-09T07:31:46","date_gmt":"2019-01-09T12:31:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7662"},"modified":"2019-01-24T07:14:46","modified_gmt":"2019-01-24T12:14:46","slug":"genes-and-genealogy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7662","title":{"rendered":"Genes and Genealogy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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An unexpected delight of my stumbling genealogy researches has been discovering and re-discovering my cousins. Most of my father\u2019s family lived geographically close to me when I was growing up, but as far as getting to know them–they might as well have been a thousand miles away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My dad was the son of Hungarian immigrants who came separately to the United States in the early 1900s, met, married, lived in Michigan where my grandfather was a farmer and an autoworker. They had 15 children, 11 of whom survived to adulthood. They didn\u2019t talk about their immigration experience. At all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Online research added to the\npicture. The naturalization record for my grandfather, Ferencz Hegyi (with the\nlast name spelled six different ways on two government forms), provided the\ndate of his arrival and name of the ship he came on (the S.S. Chicago<\/em>). He applied for naturalization after being in America\nfor some years, and it listed children\u2019s names, leaving no doubt this record\nwas for my family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the ship manifest I found\nhis father\u2019s name\u2014Ferencz, or Frank, the same as his\u2014and the village he came\nfrom. Wow! My great-grandfather\u2019s name and a definite place, Kondorfa. Still\ntoday Kondorfa has only a few more than 600 residents. It\u2019s in far western\nHungary, closer to Vienna and Bratislava than Budapest, in a German-Hungarian\narea called the Burgenland. Short of learning to speak Magyar and traveling\nthere, my researches seemed to be bumping up against the proverbial brick wall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One additional clue from the\nship manifest was that Ferencz\u2019s destination was South Bethlehem, Pa. Probably\nhe planned to work at Bethlehem Steel, following in the footsteps of his older\nbrother. I found a 1923 death certificate for 38-year-old Peter Hegyi from\nKondorfa who died after being struck in the chest by a bar of steel. The\ncertificate listed his parents\u2019 names, Ferencz Hegyi and Julianna Fabian. Now I\nhad my great-grandmother\u2019s name too. But there my research string ran out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Your Genes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

People ask me whether having a\ngenetic profile helps with genealogy, and I always say yes! I spit into a cup\nfor 23andMe many years ago. A couple of distant cousins on my mother\u2019s side\nhave contacted me, all having useful connections and information. Then, a few\nmonths ago, the surprise. A woman living near Bethlehem contacted me after\nnoting our slight genetic match and the Hegyi name, which is found frequently\nin the area her family came from. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This distant cousin has website\nJane\u2019s Genes (very useful general\/tips, too), and some careful research on\nJane\u2019s part<\/a> revealed she\u2019s my fifth cousin, once removed. Our common\nancestors are my great-great-great-great grandparents Janos Herczeg (b 1747)\nand Rozalia Horvath (b 1755).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jane has put me in touch with\nother cousins in Pennsylvania and the Midwest. I learned one of my\ngrandfather\u2019s younger sisters immigrated to South Bethlehem as well, and I\u2019ve\nconnected with her granddaughter. Our Midwest cousin is another genius at\ndeciphering the spidery handwriting in the old Hungarian and Church records.\nThanks to her diligence, I can now trace my grandfather\u2019s family back six\ngenerations, to ancestors born in the early 1700s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve shared my written history\nof the Hegyi family, sparse though it is, with about a dozen first\ncousins\u2014children of my father\u2019s generation\u2014and now regularly visit several of them\nin Indiana and Michigan. I didn\u2019t have addresses for them all, though, and\nagain 23andMe came through. The granddaughter of my Uncle Bill got in touch\nand, through her, I\u2019ve communicated with her mother, my first cousin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I started working on family history, what I expected to explore was \u201chistory\u201d; now I\u2019ve learned it\u2019s about \u201cfamily\u201d too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Don\u2019t forget to watch \u201cFinding Our Roots\u201d on PBS Tuesdays, 8 p.m., hosted by Henry Louis Gates. Every family has a story!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An unexpected delight of my stumbling genealogy researches has been discovering and re-discovering my cousins. Most of my father\u2019s family lived geographically close to me when I was growing up, but as far as getting to know them–they might as … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7663,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Genes and Genealogy - finding the family in \"family history\"!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[41,266,186,104,1],"tags":[1003,416],"class_list":["post-7662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-genealogy","category-history","category-technology","category-the-morgue","category-uncategorized","tag-family-history","tag-real-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/family-tree-e1547036572248.png?fit=300%2C207&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1ZA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7662","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7662"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7662\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7665,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7662\/revisions\/7665"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7662"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7662"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7662"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}