Category Archives: One Place Study

Hajtovka, One Place Study, Udol Slovakia

History of St. Dimitry’s Parish, Udol/Hajtovka, Part 2: Turn of the 19th Century

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Yesterday, we took a look at the establishment of the villages of Ujak (now Udol) and Hajtovka, two Rusyn villages in eastern Slovakia, which are nestled in the foothills of the Tatras Mountains.

These settlers were peasant farmers – serfs working under the local noble family. Sadly, their lives had changed very little from the 1300s right up to the turn of the 19th century.

Although the end of the 1800s brought a steady decline in population, as the 19th century began, St. Dimitry’s Church grew in membership with increased population in both Ujak and Hajtovka.

St. Dimitry’s church books begin in November 1827. However, there is another way to at least get a glimpse of a handful of the families who were living there in the second half of the 18th century.

If you’ve read my earlier posts on methodology in my one-place study, you already know that it’s important to look for church records in nearby villages.

In this case, Plavnica’s St. James Roman Catholic Church was a surprising resource for a multitude of Hajtovka’s and a few of Ujak’s records.

While the village church is Roman Catholic, records include both Roman and Greek Catholics and even quite a few Lutherans living nearby who married or had children baptized in the Catholic church.

These records also indicate that, although people didn’t stray too far from their own villages – remember, travel would have been by foot for peasants – they did interact much more frequently than I would have thought in the 1700s.

Plavnica is noted with the red pin in the center of the above map. The yellow arrows indicate villages named in Plavnica’s records and this map doesn’t even include Hajtovka, which sits one mile west of Udol, which is just northeast of Plavnica.

The best part is that St. James’s records begin in the mid 1600s!

However, place names aren’t mentioned much until the mid 1700s. There probably weren’t enough people living in the area before then for village names to be important in the records.

The first mention I found in Plavnica of villagers from Ujak and Hajtovka might well be a direct ancestor of mine, as there was only one known Scerbak family living in Ujak and was that of my Nana – Julia Scerbak:

18 November 1759 – Peter Serbak (Scerbak) of Ujak married Susanna Csaputta, daughter of Jacob Csaputta of Plavnica

This entry is important for two reasons. First, in my own family, it places a Scerbak living in Ujak more than 60 years before St. Dimitry’s surviving records.

Secondly, it indicates that, in spite of the 1755 fire that burned Ujak, there were inhabitants living there full time four years later. If Ujak was abandoned after the fire, it wasn’t that way for long.

These records also gave up more of the lost history of St. Dimitry’s parish.

Father Damian Csopak was the Ujak village priest for quite a few years and his is the first priest’s name entered in 1827 in St. Dimitry’s church register.

However, St. James’s records identify an earlier Ujak priest who baptized, married or buried some of Plavnica’s Roman Catholics in the late 1700s – Father Joseph Kamensky.

Whether another priest served St. Dimitry’s parishioners in the first quarter of the 19th century is not known to me, but if Father Kamensky was fairly young in the 1790s, he might have been the only priest there before Father Csopjak arrived.

Along with the parish priest and church cantor (man who led the songs), another well-respected and important man in a village was the miller, as he ground the wheat.

The Nyemecz family appears in St. Dimitry’s records in the early to mid-1800s. BUT – the family lived in Hajtovka long before 1827 according to St. James’s marriage records.

On 26 October 1768, Judith Nemecz, daughter of miller Michael Nemecz of Hajtovka, married Simeon Mikulik of Ujak

On 13 November 1774, Maria Nemecz, daughter of Michael, miller of Hajtovka, married Paul Dulin of Orlo

Not only was the Nyemecz family Roman Catholic, but at least two Michael Nyemeczs and probably three Michaels worked as Hajtovka’s village miller.

St. James’s records mentioned quite a few Murczkos from Hajtovka. Nana’s father was Michael Scerbak and her mother was Anna Murcko.

I’ve learned from the various church records that Nana’s direct family line were 100% Greek Catholic and lived in Hajtovka. However, there was also a contingent of Roman Catholic Murczkos who lived in Hajtovka at the same time.

Given the small geographic area, the two groups were likely distantly related.

Besides the Murczkos, there were several other Hajtovka surnames that I recognized in the 1700s who were prevalent well into the 1800s, like the Tengi family and the Arendacs family.

The Tengis were almost exclusively Roman Catholic; the Arendacs mimicked the Murczkos, with many families split between the Roman and Greek Catholic faiths.

St. James’s records reinforced two other facts which I learned during my recent project.

1. Although Hajtovka was half the size of Ujak, there was a much more diverse mix of Greek and Roman Catholics living there.

2. The dozen or so villages mentioned in St. James’s records prove that villagers had much interaction with people from other nearby villages, including non-Catholics (mainly Lutherans) and non-eastern Slavic people, such as Germans, Hungarians and even a few Polish settlers who crossed the mountains and headed south.

In the next post, we’ll look at the daily lives of the children and grandchildren who would be the first to leave the villages in the late 1800s for the opportunity to have better lives.

What were the factors that brought the emigrants to the decision to leave all that they and their ancestors had known?

 

 

Hajtovka, One Place Study, Udol Slovakia

History of St. Dimitry’s Parish, Udol/Hajtovka, Part 1: Middle Ages

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As my research into the one-place study of St. Dimitry’s Church parish, comprising the small villages of Udol, where the church is located, and Hajtovka, one mile away, it is time to share what life would have been like for my ancestors.

Both Hajtovka and Ujak, as it was originally named, are mentioned in the Middle Ages, appearing in Saros County records in 1427. Ujak’s name indicates its birth as UJ = new and LAK = settlement.

This region represents a crossroads of sorts, where settlers from far and wide made their homes. People from today’s Germany, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine and points east left their marks.

Hajtovka and Ujak sit on the banks of the Poprad River in a valley near the Tatras Mountains in eastern Slovakia.

The earliest settlers, who arrived by the 1200s,  were mountain shepherds, livestock herders and farmers from an area of Romania called Wallachia; the people were known as Vlachs.

This Google Maps image gives a sense of the rolling hills and valleys at the foot of the Tatras.

The two villages seemed to thrive for over 100 years, as they were part of the Plavec castle estate well into the 16th century, but by the 1550s, the villages were deserted and all but disappeared from existence.

A short 40 years later, a new group, the Rusyns, an eastern Slavic ethnic community, began migrating into the hilly land that is home to St. Dimitry’s parish today. The exact origins of the Rusyns – whether from Ukraine or Russia – is uncertain and the topic is somewhat controversial even today.

What is clear, though, is between the 1300s and 1600s, Rusyns steadily moved westward and settled 200-300 villages in the eastern portion of modern day Slovakia, along the borders of Ukraine and Poland.

Primitive new homes in Ujak and Hajtovka were built by these Rusyns and, by 1600, there were 17 serf houses plus the Soltys house, for the noble who owned the land.

Rusyns were easily identified by (1) their dialect related to the Old Russian language and (2) their fervent faith and membership in the Eastern rite Orthodox/Catholic church.

A bit of church history is necessary here to understand the differences between the Roman Catholic religion and what became the Greek Catholic, or Byzantine Rite, Church.

In 1054 A.D. the Roman and Orthodox churches split into two factions. The differences in religious beliefs kept them apart until 1646, when the Orthodox Church united with Rome. That was an event not welcomed by many Orthodox church members, but, by 1672, the Greek Catholic Church was officially recognized (apart from the Orthodox rite, which continued to be a political issue well into the 20th century).

Therefore, with the division between Orthodox and Byzantine, Rusyns had to choose between religious practices and traditions. They chose the Byzantine, or Greek Catholic Church.

Those who have grandparents or earlier ancestors who belonged to the Greek Catholic Church almost surely are of Rusyn descent.

Ujak became almost exclusively Greek Catholic. Few Roman Catholics could be found there even in the 1800s. Hajtovka, a village less than half the size of Ujak, was also predominantly Greek Catholic, but there were a number of Roman Catholics living there who worshiped in the nearby village of Plavnica. More on that in the next post.

Greek Catholic churches were built in a distinctive wooden style, which unfortunately means that few early churches survived as the structures burned down. Divine Liturgy (rather than Mass, as in the Roman Catholic rite) was celebrated in Church Slavonic, the modern day version of the Old Russian language.

Sections inside the church were divided – one area for men, one for women and one for the priest. While portions of the Divine Liturgy are sung, no musical instruments are used during the service.

The Rusyns brought with them not only their religious practices, but distinct Rusyn dialects, which over time, have taken new words into the language – from Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, Romanians and even Germans. In modern times, English has also enriched the Rusyn language. These language influences reinforce the central idea that Ujak and Hajtovka are located in the heart of cultural and ethnic crossroads.

Life didn’t change much for the villagers from the Middle Ages until well into the 19th century.  In 1755, the village of Ujak burned. The church was built on a hill slightly above the village to save it from town fires. I haven’t found evidence that the church burned at that time, but St. Dimitry’s was rebuilt in 1866.

By November 1827, when St. Dimitry’s Church records begin, there were 88 homes in Ujak and, based on history, there were perhaps 40 homes next door in Hajtovka.

St. Nicholas, the protector of the poor and of herds, is a popular figure in Greek Catholic churches. It may be a reflection of the hard lives they led for centuries.

Next, we will look at life in the 1800s through the eyes of my ancestors.

Background history about the area was found at Farnost Udol, where Google Translate was my friend, and in An Ethnic History of Slovakia, by Jan Botik, PhD, published in 2021, pages 180-202, which has been translated into English. I downloaded the PDF, but now that I am searching for the original link, it isn’t showing up.

One Place Study

Applying What I’ve Learned in My One-Place Study to Genealogy Research: A Summary

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The one-place study of St. Dimitry’s Church, serving Udol and Hajtovka, Slovakia has been both an enjoyable and informative project.

Compiling baptism, marriages and burials recorded in St. Dimitry’s Church registers for Udol and Hajtovka has taken about two months.

I am winding down the data collection, which has gone fairly well. Records begin in November 1827 and continue to 1935. However, I’ve decided not to tackle the last 15 years for two reasons.

First, there are living people who are included in that time frame. Second, that record set (c1920 to 1935) is in Cyrillic.

Regarding my need to learn Cyrillic script, I think I’ve done quite well considering the non-familiar alphabet and a number of instances of poor cursive and/or faded ink.

I have extracted information for the years from 1850 to 1857, which are also in Cyrillic and I’m quite pleased with my efforts. I have only 18 baptismal entries, 7 marriages and 8 burials which I still need to decipher.

Not bad considering I have no previous experience with Cyrillic writing.

NOTE: If you are reading this and would like to help out a fellow genealogist and tell me/confirm what the surnames in Cyrillic are, I would be extremely grateful. There are no sentences involved, just first and last names for births marriages and burials. First names aren’t the issue, just surnames. I think I know what several of them are, but because the name only appears once – i.e. no family with children to connect them – I am hesitant to accept what I think the name says. Please leave a comment if you can help. 🙂

What’s my takeaway from all of this?

Church records, created at a time where many were illiterate, and often in rural locations,  likely have way more errors and omissions than most of us ever imagined.

If your family lived in such a place, you might consider your own one-place study to learn how many ways your family surnames were spelled and to build out single surname family trees to identify every person with that surname, regardless of whether you know where they fit into the family.

You might be surprised at how many children and adults turn up in one record but not another.

If creating a full one-place study isn’t your cup of tea, but you have families recorded in church records, I highly recommend building out collateral branches of the family tree found in those records.

This will provide an opportunity to determine how accurate – or inaccurate – the church books might be.

Be sure to take into account the following factors:

1. History of the area and who might have been in charge of the records

Records in an area with frequent governmental control changes might literally change overnight.

Here are two baptisms from 15 September 1850:

Being familiar with the village surnames, it’s no problem to read these two entries.

The next baptism took place one month later on 13 October 1850. During that time span, governmental control changed (not the priest, who was in the parish long before and long after this date).

In this second entry, 13 October is easy enough to figure out. The script hasn’t completely converted to Cyrillic here. It’s a bit of a hybrid. The C is our S and the y is our u, so the baby is Susanna.

In this case, the scribe hasn’t converted the N in Susanna. The name would look like CYCAHHA, which I’ve learned from experience!

The parents’ names are in the next box – Vancso (Vancsov), John & Petrisin, Anna.

It took me long enough to learn to read just names of just the main characters, so to speak. I skipped the names of the godparents and other details as I compiled the event information.

2. Surname spellings, name changes/extensions might refer to one or multiple people (e.g. Lesko becoming Leskopetra, Leskojurko and Leskoszifa to separate out members of a large family) and the use of aliases in the area might or might not be common.

In my own Rusyn direct line, I had not come across any ancestors using aliases and didn’t even realized they existed in the area until I delved deeply into the records.

I was used to seeing them in Scandinavian records and am familiar with French “dit” names, although I have no French ancestry, aside from a Huguenot family who fled to England in the late 1500s.

It is also important to recognize that names aren’t consistently written in the same way in every record.

The first mention of John might only identify him as John Lesko. Another might call him John Leskopetra, while a third might call him John Leskopetra, son of Michael. Leskopetra, I learned, only means that he was from a branch of the family who was Peter Lesko, not that the person was a son of Peter, as compared to, say, Johannes Jensen in Denmark, being “Jens’ son = Jens sen.”

Complicating matters is the appearance of, say, two Michael Leskopetras close in age, and three John Leskpetras, also close in age.

Without mention of the mother’s name, it is dangerous to create family groupings as the probability of error is extremely high.

3. Religion, or, more specifically, mixed religion families is a HUGE signpost telling the researcher to look elsewhere for more records. I will soon be sharing more of the actual history of Udol and Hajtovka. Noting families who were Greek Catholic, but married Roman Catholics allowed me to fill out family members who lived a full 35 years before St. Dimitry’s records began in 1827.

That is because there is no Roman Catholic church in Udol or Hajtovka. Nearby villages that were Roman Catholic have surviving records that pre-date those of St. Dimitry.

It was well worth taking the time to dig through those Roman Catholic records.

4. Ages are notoriously inaccurate. Assembling family units will likely produce a fairly accurate birth order for children in families. However, with the high infant mortality rate, there is no way to determine exactly when each child was born if no baptismal record is found.

Deceased infants produce many gaps in lists of children born to one set of parents and, unlike the typical pattern I’ve found in New England, children do not appear every two years following the birth of the eldest child. Sometimes, the gap is three years.

I’ve even come across a handful of families with 8-10 gaps between children. If the family left the village (probably to find work) for several years, I haven’t yet found them in the church records of other nearby parishes.

As for ages at death, I have found very few – I’d say less than 10% – of reported ages at death matching baptismal ages or ages at the time of marriage.

In fact, when there are multiple people close in age with the exact same name, combined with missing baptismal records, Identifying the parents of John Lesko, aged 3 years, who died in, say, 1852, is impossible. John’s age is probably not accurate – he could have been 2, 3 or even 4 years old. There might be baptismal records for two or three John Leskos who might be this child, but there might also be no baptismal record for any John Lesko who was born between 1848 and 1850.

I also compared ages of people found in a baptismal record who married and also appear in the 1869 Hungarian census. I don’t think I found even one example where the person’s age at marriage plus in the census both matched the baptismal record.

Culturally, the Rusyns wasted no time having infants baptized because of the mortality rate. Frail newborns were baptized by the mid-wife and healthy babies were baptized within two weeks of their births.

Therefore, it is certain that a baby baptized on, say, 11 March 1845 was no more than one month old in March 1845, but might be identified as 26 (instead of 22) when he married married in 1867 and then be enumerated as 27 years old (instead of 24) in the 1869 census.

5. Attention to details is VERY necessary in a one-place study.  I found many instances in which the mother of infants being baptized was incorrect.

It definitely was not a matter of a second marriage.

For example, this is a made up example because I didn’t note where I really came across a family with these errors. However, let’s keep with John Lesko and let’s say he married Maria Fabian. (totally made up example!)

Let’s further say they were the parents of seven children. The baptismal entries might look like this:

1. John, baptized 16 August 1852, parents John Lesko & Maria Fabian
2. Anna, baptized 19 December 1855, parents John Lesko & Maria Fabian
3. John, baptized 1 December 1857, parents John Lesko & Anna Fabian
4. Michael, baptized 28 January 1859, parents John Lesko & Maria Fabian
5. Susanna, baptized 14 April 1862, parents John Lesko & Anna Fabian
6. George, baptized 30 September 1865, parents John Lesko & Maria Fabian
7. Stephen, baptized 10 November 1866, parents John Lesko & Maria Fabian

This family is completely fictional, but it seems obvious that the scribe erred when calling John’s and Susanna’s mother Anna Fabian, not Maria.

I even found one example where the bride’s name was wrong (Maria). I found her baptismal record calling her Anna, she had a number of children and their mother was called Anna in every entry. When she died, she was identified as the wife of (say, Michael), born (say Szova).

In this example, every record matches EXCEPT the marriage entry.

I could go on and one with examples of mistakes.

In spite of the errors and omissions where there should be records, my one-place study of St. Dimitry’s has been a labor of love. I understand much more about the daily lives of my ancestors who settled in those two small villages, whose lives literally centered around their deep Greek Catholic faith. The church was truly the center of their lives, however long or short they might have been.

As for that Lesko family – They aren’t anywhere in my family tree. However, for the Leskopetras became the most populated branch of the Lesko family.

While compiling the records for each family, I came across a burial record for one man who might be the origin of the branch that became the Leskopetras, aka the descendants of an early Peter Lesko – Peter Lesko, buried 14 August 1834.

He was reportedly 97 years old! If his age is even close to accurate, he would have been born around 1737. Even if he wasn’t anywhere near as old as 97, he left many descendants and I think there is a good chance he is the patriarch of the Leskopetras.