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.

I paid a short visit to the Slovak Genealogical-Heraldic Society and saw that society members could claim discount of 20% should they want to order a DNA test from DNAtest Ltd. (Bratislava). They offer various tests. The price of a 17 marker Y-DNA one is about 115 US$, and the list price of an mtDNA is the same.

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).

Revisiting the previously empty site of the Association of Hungarian Archivists I notice with pleasure that the site is taking shape and starting to fill up with content. There are all kinds of news and notices about upcoming and past events etc.

Surprisingly, the website of the Association of Slovakian Archivists started also these very months. Just like its Hungarian peer, that one is full of info, too. Besides the organizational stuff one can read about the annual "Archives Days" (1997-2006), and the newsletter issues of the association (Fórum Archivárov, 2000-2001, 2005-). There is a link to the programme of the 2007 Days of Archives to be held in Zilina later in May. Perhaps that event might deserve a separate blog entry. Stay tuned.

WorldVitalRecords.com asked their users records relating to what countries they would like see coming to WVR, after U.S., Canada, England, Germany. Top interests are Ireland (19%), Poland (19%), Scotland (10%), Slovakia (10%). The list closes with Denmark and Italy (2%). Hungary is not even mentioned.

I'd better rush to Bratislava or to Martin and collect some content for RadixIndex.

K. Melis, the group administrator of the Zamagurie Region DNA Project sent me a kind notice about their efforts "To collect DNA samples for surnames specifically linked to the Zamagurie Region with the goal of identifying potential matches for the project members." (quote taken from the website).

Zamagurie is situated in the northern part of the former Szepes County of old Hungary, now the Spis region of Slovakia, with parts stretching over to Poland. Due to its natural beauty, it's been popular with tourists.

This is the same region where genetealogy started. Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak (Chief Family Historian @ Ancestry.com, co-founder of Roots Television, lead researcher for the PBS Ancestors series) started her own DNA research in Osturna, a village in the Zamagurie region.

The project's webpage lists a photographer with a book about the region, Wojciech Smolak. Any relation to the Smolenyaks?)

I was surprised to see Alzo in the list of surnames being researched in the Zamagurie project. Lisa Alzo has been doing and teaching Slovak research for a couple years now. Any relation?

My efforts to find the web traces of GDL, the company mentioned in the previous post, turned out to be serendipity. The Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County Public Library in Miskolc runs a digital library. They offer eletronic publications written or published by the library, and besides that, they also have a collection of old materials. The latter set includes 7 titles. The most interesting two for family history fans are the Historical contributions from the past of Abaúj-Torna County and Kosice (a journal from 1910-1918), and the Kassa (Kosice) 1892 directory.

The directory has chapters like military, church, government offices and agencies, schools, societies, industry and trade people and the list of house owners.

Before accessing the library you'd better throw away you FireFox browser, and approach the site with Explorer. Aargh. Two languages are offered for the navigation on the site: Hungarian and Slovak. To enter, hit the book, click on Dokumentumok, then on Kassai kalauz... Hit "Keresõ" to use the full-text search facility or choose "Lapozgató" to browse through the pages, or "Tartalom" to open the table of contents.

The pages are available both as scanned images of the originals and as text. A word of warning. The text has not been corrected after the OCR phase, I myself have seen several characters that have been recognized with errors.

WorldVitalRecords strives to live up to their vision to be a premier place for international genealogical research. Following their first set of 11 international genealogy search collections, on 9 Feb 30 more have been added. This new set includes interfaces for Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, and Ukraine research.

This research tool is done by using Google's Co-Op service, where one can filter Google to return results only from a select list of sites. Well, folks over there miss at least to sites that provide some subtle Hungarian family history information: RadixIndex and RadixForum.

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!

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.)

You have the opportunity to join an online research course that would cover a region adjacent to Hungary: Slovakia. As up to the end of WW1 both regions were part of the Habsburg empire, chances are that the course is useful for people interested either in Slovakia or Hungary.

These classes are offered by Ancestry.com, with select experts being the instructors. The Slovak class is hosted by Lisa Alzo.

The upcoming Slovak beginner class is scheduled to start on Aug 25, 2005. Every week two lessons are provided. There are 8 lessons to be taken. Cost is $29.95. Sounds interesting? Basic Slovak Genealogy Research Class

You don't want to miss the information on other available classes. Lisa is going to host part 2 of the Slovak genie course (Slovak Intermediate Research Class, from Oct 13), as well as beginners' (Sept 1) and intermediate (Nov 3) classes on Eastern Europe research.

Slovakia's online cemetery database is going to reach a milestone these coming days. The number of cemeteries they have records will reach 1000 soon, and the number of records is pretty close to 100,000, too. This site has an English language interface, too.

Dr. Peter Nagy sent the info to the Csaladtortenet list that a new book covering nobles families of former Pozsony County (now Bratislava, Slovakia) came out this week. Title is "Slachta bratislavskej stolice", publisher Agentura Luigi, series title Series nobilium.

I've just visited the site of the Slovak Genealogical-Heraldic Society and noticed some new things there.

The papers of the 2001 Slovak genealogy conference in Martin has been published and can be ordered on the site.

The society announced the competition for the best Slovakia-related genealogy work. Deadline for this is June 2004. This competition looks like to be organized every three year.

The publication of the Guide to Slovak and Central European family history is still to come. Perhaps more donations are needed - or they don't have the chapters ready? Well, there seems to be not much progress when compared to the year 2000 capture of the page by Web Archive Org.