Researching your Hungarian ancestors – How to get started?

• Do you have a suitable Hungarian ancestor?
• When to involve a professional?
• Your family history can be the beginning of your Hungarian citizenship journey
• FAQ

Do you have a suitable Hungarian ancestor?

For some families, the answers are straightforward: if your family has kept track of lineage and saved personal records, all you need to do might be to open a box of old family documents. For other families, finding answers might require a little detective work. The good news is that you don’t need to be a professional genealogist to get started. Here is what you need to do:

1. Start with what you already know

Before you rush to find the contact information of remote Hungarian village archives, check what is within reach. Talk to your parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or other relatives who may know more about your family history. Collect as much information as possible, focusing on the line that leads to Hungary. Eventually, you should narrow your search to one person, based on who you will be eligible for Hungarian citizenship.

Try and find out the following information about this person:

• Full name, including birth name or maiden name
• Date and place of birth (as precisely as possible)
• Names of parents and spouse(s)
• Religion
• Date and place of marriage(s)
• Date and place of death
• Circumstances of emigration, e.g. when they left Hungary, where they went
• All the names of Hungarian towns, villages or counties connected to the family

Don’t worry if you don’t know all the answers! Even an approximate year of birth or an old spelling of a name can provide invaluable information for later steps of the search.

2. Review old family documents

It’s one thing to know all the things about your family history – it is another thing to be able to verify it. Look through the documents available to you and see if you have all the paperwork that can prove that your ancestor was Hungarian, and that you are related to them.

Pay special attention to:

• birth certificates
• marriage certificates
• death certificates
• old passports
• naturalization records
• immigration documents
• military papers
• church certificates
• letters
• photographs – check the back too!

While not all of these documents can be used during the citizenship application procedure, even the back of an old photo might reveal valuable information that can set you in the right direction.

Pay special attention to place names. Knowing that your ancestor was born in Hungary is great, but identifying the actual town or village can make a huge difference when looking for vital records.

3. Brace for name variations

Historical Hungarian genealogy can become complicated surprisingly quickly. Since historical Hungary included territories shared with German, Slovak, Romanian, Croatian, and Serbian populations, just to name a few, Hungarian personal names might not have been recorded in Hungarian. Additionally, the territory of Hungary changed significantly during the 20^th century, meaning that the town where your Hungarian ancestor lived might not be part of modern Hungary anymore. (You might still be eligible for citizenship, but the process could be affected.)

For a little twist, the name of your ancestor(s) might have been changed upon emigration or arrival to their new home country.

In line with the above, the names of persons or places might not match up in various records. Don’t worry, this can be accounted for during professional genealogy research.

4. Map one generation at a time

It can be tempting to jump directly to the person you believe to have been your Hungarian ancestor, but when aiming for proof of lineage, being methodical does you more good in the long run. You will need to provide evidence for your connection to your Hungarian ancestor, which will require proof for every family member in the lineage.

Our advice: work your way along your family tree one step at a time. Start with yourself, then move on to your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, or any further ancestors. Create a simple family tree and record names, dates, locations, marriages, and other information as you go. This will also help you identify missing links in the chain between you and your Hungarian ancestor.

5. Treat online genealogy resources as a starting point

Online genealogy databases can be very useful when you want to locate historical records and confirm family information. However, the electronic documents you recover this way might not be valid for the purpose of citizenship application. Depending on your procedure, you may eventually need official certificates, archival copies, or other acceptable hard copies. You might be better off thinking of online research as a way for finding the trail, not the destination.

When to involve a professional?

There is a chance that by following the above steps, you will find every document relevant and required for your Hungarian citizenship application. However, there is a chance that you have come up with more questions than what you started with, denoting missing links in your family tree, surname changes or variations, uncertain locations, obscure villages not even in modern-day Hungary, or documents missing for entire generations.

If you managed to collect some information about your Hungarian ancestors, but

• you are unsure what it tells you,
• you don’t really know how to proceed,
• you have found some missing links,

consider attending an Initial Genealogy Assessment with one of our experts. During the assessment, the two of you will review the family information and documents you already have, identify problem areas, and come up with an action plan.

Depending on your case, we will probably recommend one of two services:

• Document Retrieval if the relevant record has already been identified and needs to be obtained; or
• Genealogy Research, if you still need to identify an ancestor, location, record, or family connection.

This way you are not required to make a commitment on choosing one service or the other on your own. The Initial Genealogy Assessment allows you to understand the research needs of your case and establish the most suitable path to recovering relevant documents based on the information you already have.

Please note: if your Hungarian ancestors are from territories that are not part of modern-day Hungary, you will probably need more extensive genealogy research. Historical border changes might make locating surviving records a more complex process.

Your family history can be the beginning of your Hungarian citizenship journey

Researching your Hungarian ancestors is about more than collecting names and dates. You may discover where your family lived, how they moved across countries and borders, and pieces of your history that have been forgotten over generations. If your goal is Hungarian citizenship, those discoveries may also become the foundation of your application.

Not sure whether the information you already have is enough for Hungarian citizenship application? Book a consultation with our team to discuss your options. If it turns out that you will need more documents to prove your eligibility, we can guide you toward the right level of research during a genealogy assessment.