There is a traditional festivity event in Somogy County, called the Megyenap ("Day of the County"). This year it is organized for early January. One of the attractions of this recent one is a 13 meters (29 feet) wide chart showing the genealogies of European royal families since 740. (another link)

This year's conference of the Federation of East European Family History Societies (FEEFHS) will take place 1-3 October in Detroit, Mi. Deadline for submitting proposed lecture/workshop/panel titles is getting closer now, it is set to 31 January.

Rev. Henry Fischer organizes a Danube Tour 2004 for 4-22 Sep 2004 starting from Munich and ending in Frankfurt and targeting Hungary. What captured my attention is that it traces not only the well-known touristic attractions of the western part of Hungary (Transdanubia), but also really many smaller towns and villages. Tailored for Danubeswabian genealogists? Probably.

Kolozsvár's (Cluj-Napoca) publishing house Korunk came out with a new title: "Álló- és mozgóképek". The book is a collection of memories from aristocratic families' members in the post-1945 Romania era.

The Hungarian Minister of Culture appointed the members of the committee to research the fate and whereabouts of the so-called Jaross-lists (named after the Minister of Interior in 1944, Andor Jaross, sentenced to death and executed for war crimes in 1946). The 1944 decree ordered to compile lists of Jewish people to be sent to ghettos.

Little is known about the fate of these lists. It is still unclear if they are still extant, and if yes, whether they should be found at Hungarian secret services archives or in the ex-Soviet Union or somewhere else.

The would-be NDA (National Digital "Database" - of Hungary) was mentioned here a few days ago. István Moldován of the Hungarian Electronic Library - as one of the coordinators and the future host of the documents that will become available - posted an update of this project on the Hungarian digitization listserv. Years are needed to put the 3800 titles of the selected materials into machine-readable form. To start with some, though, the core of the core has been selected, too. What does the list contain? Encyclopedia, bibliographies, dictionaries, gazetteers, fiction, literature, language journals, history periodicals. Antyhing geared towards genealogists? Directories of the state (tiszti címtárak) and a whole bunch of historical source collections.

Hello there to unknown friends at Family Preserves and at the ThompsonClan6 blogs, and thank you for the links!

Big thanks go to Steve (the Great) of the index.hu board for this find. Hungary's popular daily Népszabadság writes about the "Családi Emlékezet" (Family Memory) initiative of the Hungarian Ministry of Education - at last!

There has been almost no coverage on the subject. Now, according to the article, plans are drawn to provide a software with the help of which students will be able to record all the things in their families' memory. Something like a genealogy software, it seems. Disputes about privacy issues have been started, and will, for sure, produce more publicity.

Well, it pays to read every now and then the GenealogyBlog over there.

Joe Edmon posted an entry about the new developments of the Hungarian Gold Train case. This train shipped the confiscated valuable personal properties of Jewish families at the end of WW2 and ended up in US custody. Now US government agencies are accused of being non-responsive to requests.

Don't want to miss the opportunity to wish a Happy New Year to the readers of the blog.

Without looking into that crystal ball - I'm better in looking into the other direction in time - I have some ideas what this new year could bring to family historians. And without being comprehensive, if I may.

Hungarian Genealogists and local historians might find more and more fruits of the efforts of the government to digitize holdings in archives, libraries and museums. Besides initiatives (e.g. NDA - National Digital Archives (Hungary) set to digitize 3000 titles of Hungarian reference books) to be done centrally, various bodies and institutions receive funding to convert documents to digital content. My employer, the University of Pécs Library is working on its digital library, too. In a few weeks we would like to announce our opening. Interested parties will find local history items, gazetteers, directories in the collection.

Perhaps even more interesting will be the archival documents that might be seen on internet puter screens. And of primary interest are B/M/D records in Hungary.

The largest project that I'm aware of from this genre is the one to digitize Jewish church records of Budapest. I don't have exact details about this, have to do dig into it. Maybe the start of this service will coincide with the opening of the Budapest Holocaust Research Center and Museum set to open in April 2004.

The Baranya County Archives here in Pécs won partial funding to start converting B/M/D records from microfilm to digital. I hear that the Budapest City Archives considers doing it, too, or, work is already in progress.

Rumor has that B/M/D records in Romania (including Transylvania) have been microfilmed years ago. It is only now that their existence is confirmed by authorities. As Romania seeks membership in the European Union it is possible that their archives open their doors wider. The Mormons might make a breaktrough here.

And something from my own plans. I'd like to add the 1,000,000th record to the RadixIndex databases in early Feb. By this much improvements to the searching interfaces and facilities should be done and also, site should be prepared for institutional subscribers with IP-based access. This year will bring primary, archival sources and records to RadixIndex, too. Besides, I've been playing with the idea of inviting owners of scattered databases to contribute their resources to a subscription-based site for family historians.

... and posting on Roots-L @ BITNET. Just found this message from Dec 1993 - 10 years ago: Re: Croatia. Email was soo new and I had a passing interest in genealogy at those times. Hence the post.

Oops, for a good part of yesterday (12 hours) sites on this server were unreachable. Sorry for the inconveniencies. We are back for good, and also, measures have been taken to move this site to a new server at a new hosting provider. I'm very excited now as we will get our own dedicated server this time. Hope to switch smoothly.