RadixLog is back with some great news. These days my RadixIndex site became ten years old. To celebrate the anniversary RadixIndex has a 10 weeks record addition campaign, at the end of which the number of available records should grow to 2 millions. The free records policy has been changed for the better, too - I believe. By April about 20% of the records will be freely available.

Let me quote the first paragraph from the news item announcing the anniversary:

RadixIndex, the subscription-based website providing genealogists and local historians with Hungary-related databases was launched on February 1, 2010. Now, on the occasion of its tenth birth day I would like improve RadixIndex services by taking steps ahead, one at a time. First of the main elements in this process is the addition of 100,000 new records every week during the following 10 weeks - this way the record count should reach 2 million records by April. The other major change is the transformation of the free records policy. Instead of the former practice of the free availability status of newly added records the records containing the 70 most frequent surnames become available for anyone. Every day during the 70 day period of 10 February - 20 April one surname from the most frequent list is added to the freely available set. This new system is first applied to the RadixRef database, which is to be followed by other existing or coming databases.

Continued on the RadixIndex news page.

Hey everyone, free rides at WorldVitalRecords Aug 11-13, 2009. What makes it really interesting to Hungarian genealogy researchers is the fact that they provide a digital version of Martha Remer Connor's indexes to several counties of the 1828 census of Hungary.

Free access has no strings attached, no credit card, no registration required. Enjoy while it lasts!

In case you miss this opportunity, you can subscribe price to the databases served at WVR via my The index to the 1828 census of Hungary site, too. Monthly and yearly subscriptions are available for rather moderate prices.

I'm sitting in the Millenaris Center in Budapest, the venue of the Budapest Book Festival. What brought me here is the digitization conference organized by Arcanum. The company is 20 years old this year.

I plan to tweet about the event using my Twitter account. Follow me!

Thanks to a prominent member on the Hungarian Csaladtortenet (Family History) list at RadixIndex, several of Arcanum's upcoming or not widely published resources have been mentioned. These large corpora offer valuable information for the family historian, too.

The first of the announced collections - with less info for the genealogist - was the minutes and documents of Hungary's Parliament, 1867-1918, 312,000 pages.

The second one is more promising for the ancestry researcher: publications of Hungarian museums is an almost complete collection of the yearbooks and other publications by county museums and by several other museums in Hungary - 1500 volumes, 370,000 pages. (announcement)

The third set is the one that has or will soon have the beef. Publications of Hungary's archives is a growing corpus making the volumes of archives available and searchable online. (announcement)

The museum and archives collections use the same navigation systems. Search is made possible by full-text keyword search and the volumes can be browsed going down from the article level to the page level. The texts are predominantly in Hungarian with eventual abstracts. The technology is dual layer PDF: texts were OCR-ed and dual layer (text and image) PDF pages were created.

Bon appétit!

A recently published study on the Society of Hungarian Archivists website (Az egyházi anyakönyvek digitalizálásának lehetőségei) suggests that a digitization of the metrical registers of churches within modern Hungary's borders might be brewing soon. The study was written by Arcanum's Sándor Biszak, and two archivists of Roman Catholic diocesan archives, Andor Lakatos (Kalocsa) and Ádám Vajk (Győr).

The authors go into details about the sources first, their scope of information and calculating the figures involved (chapter 2). A survey of efforts at FamilySearch, Ancestry.com, the Passau R. C. Diocese, The National Archives and two services covering Scottish research follow (chapter 3). This part treats three projects of Hungarian archives, too (Kalocsa, Győr, Nógrád County). Chapter 4 discusses the levels of digitization and service possible, chapter 5 compares these. Pitfalls are listed in chapter 6.

The study has many interesting details and figures involved in such a digitization, such as the change in the research needs at archives (huge growth of family history cases),
the total number of reels of microfilmed registers (about 3.3 millions), the percentage of available original indices (6%) etc.

For a possible digitization the authors suggest that instead of using the available microfilm copies as a source of scanning, the originals should be recorded using high performance professional digital still cameras. However, they have doubts about the feasibility of access to the originals. In contrast to the situation today, we can read about the way the Mormon microfilming in Hungary in the 1960s could be ordered by authorities.

The assessed cost of recording (shooting the images) with minimal metadata added is about 2 million US $. Three levels of textual processing are calculated: 1) personal names index: 2 million $, 2) a database with more information tailored for family historians: 8 million $, 3) a database enabling any kind of historical research: 16 million $.

It's an impressive study, I must say, but there is one weak point in it that, I believe, makes the whole concept questionable. And this is the digitization efforts of LDS. The authors seem like missing ScanStone and the accompanying Family Search Indexing projects altogether.

True, the appearance of Hungarian church registers in Family Search Indexing is anybody's guess, it should not be that far to make a project with similar efforts and offerings reasonable.

The Hungarian National Archives kindly responded to my email asking about the status of the digitization of the 1828 census of Hungary. According to their information the launch of the service is expected for the Summer of 2009, at earliest. The processing of the 1720 census is more advanced.

The 1828 census of Hungary has been a tempting piece in WVR's World Collection since its appearance in early Feb 2008. The price was a bit high, though. (David Lifferth explains pricing.) There have been several offers that have allowed those interested to buy the yearly membership at discounted prices.

Yesterday I blogged about the expected opening of the Hungarian National Archives' version of the 1828 census. I believe it would include all the counties covered in the census - Martha Remer Connor's indexes, i. e. the WVR database offers 25 counties.

Going to WorldVitalRecord's site today I realized that similarly to their US Collection, they now started selling monthly subscriptions to the World Collection, too. Now that's affordable! The price for the monthly subscription is set to $14.95.

I think it is the time to get my affiliate account active and start plugging for WorldVitalRecords.com.

If you can't wait for the Hungarian National Archives service, have a research brickwall in the area of those 20 counties in the first half of the 19th century, don't mind the UK census and all other databases coming with the subscription, then you might consider to buy the monthly subscription for $14.95 (recurring until cancellation).

And should you proceed and should you wish me to get a 20% commission of your purchase, please follow this link. If you'd rather go without a commission for me, please follow this link.

Prof. Gecsényi, general director of the Hungarian National Archives has an updated lectori salutem on the homepage of the repository. He describes the archives' efforts to become a more service and patron oriented institution.

2007 already brought a number PR boosting events organized and hosted by the archives, like the History in hands reach in November (see a nice video on YouTube), the Days of Cultural Heritage programs, including a historical playground for children. And for 2008 there is a coming competition for the kids on the May Day of Museums.

Talking about the digitization planned and under way the director mentions that online access to Hungary's 1720 and 1828 national censii is being prepared.

It was some weeks ago that WorldVitalRecords.com opened its World Collection with the index to 25 counties of the 1828 census.

Just saw the message by Jim L. on RootsWeb's Hungary-L. WorldVitalRecords.com (Ancestry.com founder's, Paul Allen's company) launched their World Collection today. One of the titles they offer is "Germans and Hungarians 1828 Land Census". According to the short info available on the site this database contains 400,000 record transcriptions from 25 counties. This is certainly the fruit of Martha Remer Connor's work.

There is a one-day 33% off from the price of the World Collection: $99.95 instead of $149.95. The census volumes in their original printed form cost between $15 and $35 each. I'd expect WorldVitalRecords.com them to lower the pricing in a few month's time, just in case the thirst for these Hungarian genealogy records could wait: After leaving Ancestry.com, Allen still felt the need to bring families together and to do it in a way that was affordable to families.

Thanks to Dr. Péter Nagy's message on the Csaladtortenet list, yet another database can be added to the list of sites visited by genealogists.

Katastrálny portál by Slovakia's GS contains information about land owners in the country.

To see if persons with certain surnames own land in Slovakia, follow this route. Click on the "Vlastníci" menu item on the left, choose a Kraj (county), Okres (district), Obec (settlement) and Katastrálne územie (cadastral district within settlements). Then put the surname into the Vlastník - názov (owner - name) field, hit Vyhl'adat' in red and there you go. You will get a list of owners - their names, residences, often dates of birth, then the lot numbers owned.

Today I had a chance to look into the document that I saw announced on both blogs I visit regularly: Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and Leland Meitzler's Genealogy Blog.

FamilySearch, the LDS sponsored online genealogy site released a document on Aug 15, 2007, in which they invite proposals of genealogy-related companies (providers in the document) to index and then to provide access to scans of originals of various sources relevant to genealogy research. LDS has started to mass-scan their microfilm rolls a few months ago, and besides the volunteer-based FamilySearch Indexing, they now invite commercial ventures to join the party.

What does it have to do with Hungarian genealogy? The documentation of the Genesis Project list (look for Attachment C) includes this item:
Hungary civil registration
2,668,800 images
10,675200 records

Wow!

I'm not sure what years are covered, though. My guesstimate is that it must be basically 1895 plus 10 or 15 years, that is 1895-1905/1910, or so. LDS filmed heavily Hungary's civil records back in the mid-1990s, early 2000s. Civil records (births) in Hungary get a privacy protection for 90 years.

FamilySearch's suggested fields to be included in the index for these records lack some of the vital ones I'd process for sure. Only in the optional fields list can one find these: child's birthplace, Parents' residences and birthplaces, groom's and bride's birthplaces, witnesses' names and residences, deceased's death place, residence, birthplace.

Indexing the estimated 10 million records is not a small job - and the I'm a bit skeptic about the profitability of the indexer and provider in this venture.

First I thought that I'd submit my proposal for the tender, but reading through the RFI/RFP I changed my mind.

Here is the sketch how this would work. FamilySearch does the scanning. FamilySearch and Provider (indexer) write a contract. In the case of some datasets Provider is to create a contract with the Record Custodian (owner of the originals), as well. This is the case with the Hungarian civil records, too. Provider then starts indexing. FamilySearch would like to get the proposed datasets completed within 24 months. When ready, Provider would start hosting the digital images along with the indexes. Members of FamilySearch (FHCs on their premises, members of LDS, submitters of family trees with a certain number of records, FamilySearch Indexing volunteers with a certain level of performance) plus affiliates of the Record Custodian at each of their premises should be granted with free access. So, at the end of the day, who would really be left without free access? How could Provider reap the rewards of its approx. 50,000-100,000 hours of indexing the Hungarian civil records set, plus setting up and servicing, providing it?

A few days ago one of our genealogy fans on the Csaladtortenet mailing list posted the availability of the database of the public cemeteries in Gyõr. As Gyõr is Hungary's 6th largest city by population, this database contains several tens of thousands of records.

The search interface is in Hungarian, but it's easy to get around. Put your researched name or 3 characters at least into the "Név" (Name) field (stripping off special Hungarian accents is OK) and hit "Keresés" (Search). You'll get the name of the buried person, birth and death dates or years (if known), the cemetery name and a link to the map of the cemetery. Clicking on the link you can find either the section of the cemetery with the tomb of the deceased or simply the map of the cemetery.

I happened to crank up my browser and go down crossing the Drava River to see what was up in Croatia. I could find quite a few remarkable things down there.

Genealogy fans founded the Croatian Genealogy Society named after Pavao Vitezovic in June 2005. They seem to be an active group, consisting of both academic and hobby researchers. During their annual meeting in March 2007 their president announced their coming journal Rodoslovlje (Genealogy). They organized a presentation of the 2004 Slovenia made reference book Rodoslovje in April 2007. The society hosts a genealogy forum on their site, too.

I'm not quite sure following what links I found my way to Moja Bastian (My heritage). This is a Croatian firm run by young people offering printing services for family trees and heritage, biographical books. Besides their flagship products they also provide research services, done either by themselves or by their research associates.

Would they reach for international markets? Could they become competitors for Ancestry.com's coming AncestryPress?

The last part of my virtual Croatia trip took me to the Zagreb City Cemetery website. If the visitor clicks on the "English" (s)he will be presented with an English language brochure about the cemetery. It's better not to fear to enter the Croatian (hrvatski) page and to click on the "Trazilica" link on the right menu. This will bring up a search form. Well, one can search the database of not only the main cemetery, but all the Zagreb ones. My sample searches brought up burials back from the 1910s, so, the database might cover the records from the opening of the cemetery (1876). The English brochure mentions 300,000 burials. How to search? Put the surname into the "Prezime" field, and hit "Pretrazi!". One thing I notice is that it's not possible to jump further from the 1st page of hits. To truncate the search one can use the % sign to stand for several characters or the _ sign for one character. The system requires the use of proper Croatian accented letters. If you are to lazy to produce them, just use the % or _ characters.

Via Dick Eastman I learn that to celebrate the top traffic day of Ellis Island (April 17, 1907) Ancestry.com opens the doors wide. (They did it a couple of months ago, too.) Their collection contains not only the Ellis Island records, but several other ports are covered, as well. A couple of the databases has been updated and their new one (US-Canada border crossings) is also part of the free offer.

Reading Dick Eastman I notice that GenealogyBank is about to open up its subscribers-only site for a short period. And Leland Meitzler has the login/password for this offer already. Check out the Genealogy Blog post for the login info. My search a couple of minutes ago for keyword Hungary found 70,188 matching documents. The majority of them comes from GenealogyBank's Historical Newspapers collection, but there is this hefty amount of 16,971 items from their America's Obituaries database, too. The offer is good through Feb 13, 2007.

The US National Archives teamed up with Footnote, Inc. to publish their digitized holdings for the amateur and professional researchers. I read it on the EOGN site, I bet other blogs would comment on it, too.

This growing collection will be interesting for the American researcher with Hungarian ancestry as the stacks contain naturalization records and petitions already, and more will follow for sure. The casual researcher can buy an image for $1.99, while seasoned genealogists might be more interested in the monthly and annual subscriptions.

Paul Allen and his team has been up to something since their public launch back in October 2006. The goal of WorldVitalRecords is to become the number 2 genealogy company in the world.

Paul is one of the founding fathers of Ancestry.com (now The Generations Network), the actual number one family history company. He left Ancestry because it didn't stay "true to the vision that we created for it in the early years." Now he has many from the original team at MyFamily with him.

OK, now to the beef, as much as Hungarian ancestry research is concerned. WVR seem to be aiming at the long tail. In one discussion Paul mentioned that: "I was going to say ... as we launch our locality searching, we will analyze queries to see which locations are NOT giving good results [and then we will focus on content acquisition for those locations...the more obscure the better". And they do mean international records, too: World Vital Records Seeks Individuals to be on International Advisory Boards.

In fact, I contacted Yvette with my tentative interest of the Hungarian side, and I might get their information pack one day.

A month ago WVR blog announced that they began to scan millions of family history records at the Everton library. Beyond the sheer mentioning of Hungary and Romania, the blog entry of Dec 29 revealed more about the nature of the first records to come: Hungarian land records are mentioned there.

One spotted international item already published on WVR is a tip showing how Slovakian family vital records link generations.

It'd be interesting to see if there could be a bunch of people contributing Hungary-related datasets, either on a non-for-profit, voluntary basis, or as business deals with WVR.

... or what?

Wishing to get some genealogy entertainment I went to George G. Morgan's and Drew Smith's Genealogy Guys Podcast site. One item in the Nov 19 episode contents caught my eyes: Ancestry.de.

K, checking it turns out that a new site has arisen, Ancestry.de. What makes it different from other Ancestry sites is that this is the first non-English database site of MyFamily.com, Inc.

I recall seeing job postings where MyFamily sought foreign content acquisition managers in BYU's Center for Family History & Genealogy's Newsletter. Well, apparently, these were posted not without reason.

Ancestry.de offers a neat collection of online sources, already. Some of them are available after free registration.

Just for the heck of cybersquatting, I made a search on the domain name ancestry.hu (.hu stands for my country, Hungary). Guess what! ancestry.hu has been registered on Oct 27, 2006 by Myfamily.com, Inc. I don't know if they have plans to develop a site there or it was taken just in case.

I read at Dick Eastman that thanks to Ancestry the gates are wide open for folks wishing to dig around in Ancestry.com's largely expanded database of US ports.

According to MyFamily's press release the collection now counts 100 million passenger records, the time period has been expanded 1820-1960 and also, more ports have been added. Free access is provided through the end of November.

In a quick search I noticed that while the Ellis Island database (through Steve Morse, of course) included the passenger's original settlement, that of Ancestry only showed the nationality of the person I was looking at - at least in a record from the first decade of the 20th century.

This might be interesting for folks whose family roots lead to Szeged. The database of some 120,000 burials is now available on the burial services of Szeged company site: Testamentum.

I've just tried to access the site to give a short guide to its Hungarian interface, but my try failed and a database error was shown: Too many connections. Apparently the server is overloaded with requests.

OK, here is what I can remember from my visit there on Sunday.

On the left navigation menu one can possibly click on "Keresés". Then enter a surname into the "Vezetéknév" field (at least 3 characters anywhere in the name). You'll get a list names, the decade or year (sometimes date) when they were born and buried, and the cemetery plot number. You can even see the plot location on the map provided.

To find out the range of the time period in the database I entered a popular surname, Kovács into the search form. I got the impression that the first records start in the late 1800s and go up to the late 20th century.

Stephen S. of the Hungarian Special Interest Group (HSIG) @ Jewishgen posted a noteworthy site a few days ago. Öröklét? (eternal life or eternal existence, when translated into English) contains a database of names and information found on headstones in various, mostly (or exclusively?) Jewish cemeteries across modern Hungary. 100 cemeteries are listed. The number of persons is not easy to assess, it's a 6 figure number, for sure. The completeness of the records for each cemetery varies. The Kozma Str. Cemetery in Budapest has 200,000 records - probably a complete set, while some others have only 1-10.

Just a quickie before we start the second half of the year.

A post on the Csaladtortenet list drove the eyes of list members to the newly started Anacleto version of Arcanum. For one month Arcanum opened its door to the public wide. All of Arcanum's text-based publications are available here for free, no strings attached.

To start its discovery, click on the plus sign on the left side before "Arcanum szövegtár". You'll get the list of areas covered by Arcanum. "Családtörténet, heraldika" opens genealogy and heraldry resources, but there are precious items folded under other headings, too.

To search the corpus by keywords put your query in the space next to "Keresés" in the upper left area.

The vast information opened now had been offered within Arcanum Online, a monthly subscription service. Apparently, Arcanum'd like to introduce their newly acquired Anacleto platform. Before that Arcanum used the Folio Views technology. (The Folio Corporation was founded by Curt Allen, later CEO of MyFamily.com, Paul Allen's brother. And Paul seems to be at our beloved hobby, genealogy again: Everton publishers to team with Provo Labs. OK, rant stops here, just like my post of the day. (I mean of the month, ouch!))

Thanks to the post on the Csaladtortenet mailing list I read that the Social History Online Database of the Budapest City Archives has been finally opened. (An old post about it in the blog.)

The database contains metadata about the documents in the holdings of the archives, covering the following subject areas:
- Probate cases (provenience: court records, public notaries' records), 1915-1955, full coverage.
- Various records of public notaries, 1875-1950. As of now, the period of 1875-1900 is covered the most in the database.
- Cases at various courthouses in Budapest, 1872-1895. The Court of Budapest is fully processed.
- Last wills and testaments, 1896-1950, fully processed, the period of 1699-1873 is under processing.
- Orphans' courts' records, first records planned to be released in 2006.

Wow! That's a real treasure for the genealogist digging around Budapest.

Enter a surname in the simple search form and you there you go (mind the Hungarian accented letters, though). Or, click on "Részletes keresés" for the detailed search form.

This is going to be a quickie post to say goodbye to 2005 (and in the advent of a real fat 2005 retrospect to come in Jan 2006).

On the H-SIG mailing list of Jewishgen Vivian Kahn posted a new database available on the website of Nation's Memory Institute of the Slovak Republic.

The database lists Jewish business properties that were confiscated by the state during Tiso's Slovak Republic, 1941-42. There are more than 10,000 listed.

Type letters in the Podnik field to search by surname, searches for place names would need input in the Mesto (obec) field. Note that proper Slovakian accented letters are needed. If you are not sure, you can just type the beginning of the words, auto-truncation will help you - to search for the place Presov (there is a hachek over the s), simply type Pre.

See you in 2006!

A new set of data has been added to FamilyTracker.com's offers. This time their partner in Romania, Marcel Mindrescu added a collection of transcribed Jewish Cemetery records from Oradea, Romania (formerly Nagyvárad, Hungary). The press release also mentions that this is ment to be only the beginning, "the first of many planned from this part of the world".

I remember Gene Hall, FamilyTrackers, Inc. CEO sharing this news item with the members of Rootsweb's Hungary-L, too, and according to Google here and there it got posted on the Jewish Genealogy 2000 and Genealogy on the Internet lists, as well.

The former Google search brings up a new genealogy blog, the one by Gene Hall: FamilyTrackers blog. Interesting. One of the more recent blog items gives a basic overview of genie research in Romania: Genealogy in Romania - It's Tough but Possible.

I should sign up for the offered free account at FamilyTrackers to report what's inside. Does anybody have experiences with them? They made some nice peaks in May and August 2005 - according to Alexa. (But what are those unrelated domain names?)

Similarly to Soroksár, Diósd is an old settlement with Danubeswabian ancestry around Budapest.

Not like the sad news from Soroksár, Diósd has something that would bring a smile on every genealogist's face. Enthusiasts living in Diósd started a website with comprehensive info on the ancestries of their inhabitants. Diosdfa.hu (available in Hungarian and in German) provides B/M/D records from church matricula, hundreds of old photographs showing people, events, buildings - everything connected to Diósd.

Well done!

Today my mailbox had the Arcanum Newsletter #23 inside. Not without news! On July 1, 2005 they are going to come up with a new look of their website, and what is more exciting, they plan to launch a new service, Arcanum Online. Yahoo! Arcanum Online will offer all the text based publications (contents of their CD-s and DVD-s) they ever published.

July will be a testing month with free accounts, from August the service should go into a paying one. How much, you'd ask. While I'm not entitled to give out the figure Arcanum CEO Mr. Biszak mentioned in a private talk back in late April (watch out for stuff later here on Radixlog about our meeting), its yearly subscription was then planned to be more than a CD's price, and less than that of an Arcanum DVD.

To claim your free July account you should ask for it via email, call them or visit them in their office.

OK, we have quite much lagging with reporting on Arcanum publications that came out the last 12 months. Should make up for this.

While collecting various items for the blog, I can't withhold this info. Kind of urgent.

I've just got the word from Arcanum Ltd CEO that their huge freely online databases are going to be removed from their site - in a matter of days, or weeks. (He gave permission to share this info.)

Among the other titles interesting for family historians are the ones within the gesta directory. Including standards on Hungarian nobility, the works by Iván Nagy and Farkas Kempelen.

The bottom line: if you use this site, search while you can.

There was a photo contest with the subject of Budapest back in January. Some 1600 photos were submitted in three categories: "Modern Budapest", "Dark Budapest" and "Funny Budapest". All the photographs are available here.

The Budapest Public Library opened its redesigned website 2 weeks ago. One of the new features would be the Picture Archives of Budapest. Unfortunately, their database server doesn't seem to work, or at least, doesn't accept connections from outside - hope they will be able to fix it. The picture archives is linked here.

Peter Schmidt announced the opening of the improved site with the database of the Deutsch-ungarischer Familienkalender subscriber lists. Years 1932-1934 are covered by now, with more than 80,000 records.

Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation is set to release their DNA database on Monday. After a short visit to their site I noticed that it might not be that easy to find your genetically related people. It takes efforts to get an idea what results this type of research would yield. Will see how it develops.

According to this article in Hungary's popular daily Népszabadság the Hungarian National Archives is working on digitizing the 1715 "national census". This census is similar to the 1828 one, with which Hungarian family historians are probably familiar.

The article suggests that personal names will not be indexed, instead, one will be able to browse digitized images going through settlements. It is told to be available in June this year.

Even more digital sources are envisioned, the 1720 and 1828 similar censii might follow.

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.

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.

Warren Blatt informed researchers on the H-SIG list of an update of the All Hungary Database at the Jewish genealogy site, JewishGen. This includes additions to the 1869 national census transcriptions database (almost all of the remained sheets of this census relate to what is now Slovakia), and a database created from various censii taken between 1795-1850. All Hungary Database

Tuesday and Wednesday this week were dedicated to a trip to Budapest. Besides grabbing a few books to be used as sources for RadixRef at secondary bookshops I also visited one of the branches of the Budapest City Archives.

This branch - currently housed in a rather strange building (a museum, formerly) in the mountainous area of Buda - contains files of court houses and public notaries of Budapest. There are two more branches of the city archives. The opening ceremony for the new building, where materials of all the branches should have been transferred, was planned for Autumn 2003 - now that's over. It looks February or March 2004 will be the date for the real launch - one can expect an interruption of services due to the move.

... Hey, but it means some good things to come, too. Archivists are working on a couple of databases that might be available on their website - and at least one of them might be accessible right from the opening at the new address. This is a database of decisions of Budapest courts regarding inheritance and last wills and testament cases - they have some 70-80,000 records now.

They also consider to continue with the old Budapest city directories - a project the realization of which Péter Király (mentioned earlier) did not think to be really likely -, and start building a new database of the family sheets of Budapest people from the infamous 1941 Hungarian national census.

I'm just back from the closing day of the DAT 2003 conference held in Budapest. I visited the section covering digitization in libraries.

I could grab a few URLs for relatively new initiatives already in work and was informed about some projects still in progress.

The Vasi Digitális Könyvtár is a searchable corpus of various publications that relate to Vas County of Hungary. A less sophisticated (clumsy?) service is the Somogyi Elektronikus Könyvtár. This latter library has scanned pages of local history publications.

The librarians of the Szabó Ervin City Library in Budapest mentioned the opening of their new website early next year with new databases added. These will include at least 4000 pictures from the Photo Collection of their Budapest Collection, the local history collection for Budapest.

They took part in adding two more resources to the online collection of Arcanum: András Vályi's Magyar Országnak leírása (Description of Hungary) and Elek Fényes-es Magyarország geographiai szótára (Geographical dictionary of Hungary). Arcanum / Gesta, then click on "Régi magyar földrajz". Both of these contain basic information about settlements in Hungary. Vályi's work is from the late 1700s and it has shorter entries. Fényes tends to be more detailed. He is from the mid-1800s.

Péter Király of Arcanum was amongst the speakers of the conference. After his lecture I had the chance to speak to him. It looks like it is pretty unlikely that another volume of the Budapest city directories could be searchable anytime soon. Oops, I just realize I forgot to mention its URL in the post of 3 December.

He could confirm the Arcanum considered the removal of the freely available Nagy Iván and Kempelen from their website.

I've been waiting for the U&C database for quite some time now. U&C stands for Urbaria et Conscriptiones. This archival collection is part of the Archives of the Hungarian Chamber (ministry of finance, basically) that can be found in the Hungarian National Archives. The collection has tax lists and inventaries of domains in the management of the chamber between the 16th and 19th centuries. The database will not have all those names mentioned in the tax lists, but it will have plenty of useful information. E. g. it will be possible to see what lists are available for a certain domain. The U&C CD will be published by Arcanum, however, as it is a work by the Hungarian National Archives staff, there will be free internet access to it, too.

Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum (Petőfi Museum of Literature, Budapest, Hungary) announced the addition of two databases to their website services. Both of them are based on the works by the celebrated Hungarian genealogist János József Gudenus.

The first one is the online version of volumes A-P of his praised "A magyarországi főnemesség XX. századi genealógiája" (The 20th century genealogy of the Hungarian aristocracy). (Volumes Q-Z to be added later.)

The second one is less explained. It's called "Magyar családtörténeti adattár" (Hungarian family history database). What is its coverage? - unknown. Have to dig into it.

To access these resources together with other goodies on the site go to the website of the museum, click on "Adatbázisok" on the left menu, click on the picture on the right site and pick the database you would like to use.

While on the site you don't want to miss the "Magyar életrajzi index" database. This indexes Hungarian biographical collection books and periodicals - 617 as of today with some 151,000 records.

... or at least, its part that contains names, professions and addresses of its inhabitants. This is the same series in which I offered lookups of names.

Péter Király made a pilot of 50 pages on it a few years ago, and now it looks like he could complete this project and it is now served from the Budapest City Archives website. Well done, well done!

Thanks to Laci Pfaff of AKUFF for sharing this news with us.

Also, while on the Budapest City Archives site I noticed another new item: the 1873-1874 minutes of the main committee City Council. The minutes is fully transcribed and searchable. Many useful items for local history researchers. It's made available by a joint venture of the city archives and of Arcanum.