Hungary Obituaries

For those, who do not understand Hungarian: I have just released the newest version of the Easy-Use front-end to the Obituaries-Collection of the the Hungarian National Széchényi Library currently on the LDS Pilot-site. it can be reached through the simplified link: www.rakovszky.eu/gindex It is searchable and very fast. Currently there are about 2750 Milestone-names for the 590 films. This number should be increased urgently. It is easy to collect these names as a byproduct of browsing the films. When you find a suitable name, you just have to enter the image-number and name in the box provided and with a click add it to your current harvest. When finished, you just have to click on a button, to send it for integration with the current list of milestone-names. Nothing can be easier, than that. For effective use, we need about 30 to 60 thousand names. Then one can pinpoint the position of the required obituary to within 15-25 names.

This latest version is table-driven, so that any other Central-European obituary collection can be integrated in it with but relatively little work.

In contrast to the just-English LDS-site, this index is multilingual, aiming to facilitate access to all inhabitants of that region, who do not speak foreign languages, and also for people originating from the region, but do not speak the language of their ancestors.

I would like to point out some errors on the of the LDS-starting page: 1.) The obituary notices are not from just the area about Budapest, but all parts of the historical Kingdom of Hungary are fairly represented. 2.) The earliest obituary (at least the earliest I found) is from the year 1803 (and not from 1820) and the latests are just a few years old. 3.) Many of these obituaries are not in Hungarian, but in German, Croatian, Roumanian, Slowakian with some French, Italian etc ones too. There are also many written in 2 languages, also there are such, that are printed both in roman and in cyrilic form.

I hope this little information will wake the interest of those, who did not know much about this collection, and that they will also helt in collecting the needed number of milestone names. I have spent at least 600 hours to develop this front-end, so I hope that there are at least 100 people, who are willing to offer a few hours of their time tand help with the indexing. If you have a fast internet line, you can index a film even in less than an hour. Most of the time is taken up by loading the images. Browsing them is in itself an interesting pastime. I would like to thank those, who helped to collect the initial 3 names/film, that made the project immediatelly useable. Now we are looking for the first occurance of a family-name. When there are many images for this name, than the first occurance of a first/given name.

Greetings