I'm en route to Budapest to attend the conference hosted by the Hungarian National Archives. The subject of the conference is Birth/Marriage/Death registers. Speakers include National Archives staff, the people who wrote the digitization of church BMD registers in Hungary study, a couple of lectures with case studies, a former Natl Archives staff member sharing her memories about the days of LDS microfilming at the archives in the 1960s, Family Tree Ltd.'s Mr. Eötvös, Karl Heinz of the Matricula project (digitizing German and Austrian registers) and Vlatka Lemic of the Croatian National Archives (digitized BMD registers in Croatia, 1580-1945).

I plan to take notes during the conference using Twitter. Follow me live or check out the updates later.

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!

Bob F. on JewishGen's H-SIG mailing list posted this info a couple of days ago: the Hungarian Cultural Center in partnership with StoryCorps are now accepting interviewees to be included in the coming StoryCorps/Hungary file.

Interviews would be recorded in New York, NJ, New Brunswick, NJ, and Washington, DC.

More info, dates and locations are available on the Extremely Hungary site.

Similarly to the timing of the (re)new(ed) websites of archivists, the Day of Hungarian Archivists and Archives Days in the Republic of Slovakia go almost parallel. The event in Budapest took place yesterday, May 3, 2007, and the conference in Zilina, Slovakia is scheduled for May 23-25, 2007.

The core subject of both conventions is digitization in archives.

I was about to register for the Budapest event, but then decided that the morsels of info I could get from the speeches covering general issues from speakers at high levels of bureaucracy would probably not worth it. Of course I missed an opportunity to socialize.

The Zilina conference looks like more promising. Little is known (at least I don't know much) about the digitization efforts of archives in Slovakia. There are some presentations with the trash words "vision", "concept", "problem", "perspective" in their titles. Now these are the ones that I'd miss. Researchers aren't expecting concepts, we'd rather see some real stuff :-).

The presentations that I'd be interested in are these:
- digitization of medieval charters (Maretta)
- digitization of large format documents (Kasiarova, Kalnovicova)
- Badatelna - archival findings aids (Bily)
- Slovakian National Archives on the web (Vimmer)
- digitization in the Banska Bystrica archives (Horvathova, Latoova).

The Slovakian association invited panelists from abroad, too. There will be speakers from Austria (Styria), Germany (Baden-Württemberg), Budapest (Budapest City Archives), Poland (Poznan), Czech Rep. (Prague), Slovenia (Ptuj).

... we had a meeting with fellow genealogy researchers of the Csaladtortenet (Family History) mailing list in Budapest. It was so successful that the second meeting is taking shape now, with its day set to May 20, 2006. More on this later.

Some 3 dozen genealogists came together on April 30, 2006 to meet each other IRL. The event turned out to be an international one, as Barnabas B. and dr. Peter Nagy of Bratislava - Samorin joined us, as well.

We had a chance to stare at each others' printed or computerized genealogies, talk about research experiences and stuff. While it was not a really commercial event, Mr. Sandor Biszak of Arcanum accepted our invitation, and offered their products at half of list price, and to make it even better, every attendant got a Borovszky on CD-ROM as a gift from Sandor. Thanks!

I offered a special database for this occasion with records to be added to the RadixRef. Then I took some 2 dozen books from my collection - the sources for RadixRef - to the event so that fellows could take photos of relevant pages.

Well, this is a belated thank you for all those who made the meeting possible: Tibor V. (securing the venue), Istvan B. (designing the logo), the ladies (snacks and cookies!) and many for the photos: common ancestor found?, Janos greeting the high society, Doyen dr. Jeno F. conversing with Janos, with Sandor in the background, Gabor Cs. and Peter Nagy conversing ... and many more photos in the files section of the Csaladtortenet list - look for files dated early May 2005.

Starting tomorrow and ending on Wed, the annual meeting of archivists in Hungary (sponsored by MLE, Association of Hungarian Archivists) is going to be hosted by the Heves County Archives in Eger.

Main tracks are:
1) Preservation and restoration
2) IT in the archives
3) Archives finance
4) Hungary-related holdings in the archives of the Carpathian Basin
5) Publishing of sources

There will be a lecture that is of interest for the family historian. In section 4 dr. Milena Ostrolucka of the archives in Kosice speaks with the title: Genealogical research in the archives of Slovakia.

She gave a similar lecture during the similar meeting of the Slovakian Archivists' Association in Kosice, June 6-8, 2005. She was then followed by Mr. Vladimír Bohinc of Konekta, genealogy and probate services. According to his presentation title, he shared the research experiences in Slovakia and abroad.

(The original quoted page within the kosice.sk domain is no more available. Google had a cached page a few days ago, it's gone by now, too :(. MSN Search has the cached page. Thumbs up for MSN. I've started to lose my faith in the much praised Google a couple of months ago. Some day I'll sum up my complaints here.)

AKUFF had the first of its three yearly meetings in Kalocsa this Saturday. (The number of come togethers might be changed to four per annum in future.)

As a member of the association I had the chance to take part of the event. There was no lecture this time, as the sit down part of the meeting was dedicated to the annual assembly with bureaucratic agenda: reports, budget, etc.

It looks like AKUFF might come out with its first published book this year. This will be an Ortssippenbuch of Nagyárpád (now part of Pécs, Hungary) by AKUFF member András Riszt. Good luck with that!

Early March 1949 was the time when noble families in Transylvania, Romania were expelled from their homes and were forced to move to locations arranged by authorities. The Castellum Foundation (of Transylvanian noble families) organized an evening to memorate this in Marosvásárhely (Tirgu Mures) on 5 March.

I always wonder why there is no big Hungarian genealogy society activity in the US. OK, I know of the Hungarian Genealogy Society of Greater Cleveland (but hey, what happened to their website at http://community.cleveland.com/cc/hungariangenealogy ?). Any other?

So, the annual conference of the Ohio Genealogical Society will run without Hungary or Hungarian related topics. Or, almost.

Genealogist celebrity (with a Rusyn background) Megan Smolenyak is going to give two presentations on 23 Apr: 1) Jump-Starting Your Eastern European Research 2) Maximizing Your Results from the Ellis Island Database.

There is quite a long list of events organized by the Carpatho-Rusyn Society this Spring. Most of them cover the historical background of the Rusyn people. There is one planned especially for family history buffs: a genealogy seminar to be organized by the Cleveland chapter of the society in May.

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.