Nicolas Sarkozy looks like winning the French presidential elections. Fearing the retaliation of the Red Army and communist authorities his father left Hungary in 1945 and joined the French Foreign Legion. Now his son is likely to become a president of a country facing immigrant issues. This Sárközy family in Hungary takes its noble predicate from Nagy-Bócsa. Something about the family history can be found here and here. (Both are in Hungarian.) This latter has a paragraph about the grandfather, Dr. György Sárközy de Nagybócsa.

The other Hungarian recently in the news is space tourist, Charles Simonyi.

To read more about famous Hungarians you might want to visit HipCat's page

Dr. Czeizel, the 2000 winner of the Joseph P Kennedy Jr Foundation international award for scientific research, is known in Hungary thanks to his work in family planning. Besides, he is a geneticist, and in this character, researcher of family trees of outstanding Hungarian artists and authors. (his works, according to Amazon)

He was one of the several people accused of infant adoption from Hungary to US violating Hungarian laws. First judgement on them was issued in 2002. Now judgement is definitive, and sentence is reduced on many of the accused, including Dr. Czeizel. He is punished with a fine.

On Friday, 12 December, the winner for the 2003 Lenau Award was announced in the Lenau Haus (Lenau House) in Pécs. Ferdinand Hengl received the award.

Ferdinand Hengl (Hengl Nándor) is the author of quite a few books on Danubeswabian family history. The range of publications by him spans from Ortssippenbuch-s and local histories to extracts to "conscriptio animarum"-s (kirchliche Seelisten) of various places and regions in Transdanubia (western part of modern Hungary). Anton Tressel has a list of his publications up to 2001 here.

Rumors went on about the bad health of Stefan Stader, the author behind the authoritative Sammelwerk donauschwäbischen Kolonisten and many other publications. Now, according to Dave Deyer's post on the Banat list @ rootsweb Herr Stader is gone. What a loss for family historians! May he rest in peace.