Hungarian Births Database

The JewishGen Hungarian Special Interest Group (H-SIG) is transcribing Jewish vital records from LDS microfilms, including birth records.  The original data were created by rabbis in each community (or for small communities, in centralized district registers) as required by the Emperor.  These records are handwritten in German, Hebrew, or Hungarian, and date between 1800-1914.

Database Fields

The database includes the following fields:

• Name — Surname and Given Name of the Child.
• Date of Birth — Birth Date of the Child: Day Month Year.
• Sex — Gender of the Child: "M" for male, "F" for female.
• Father — Father’s Given Name – the first name of the child’s father.  In the rare cases where the child’s surname is not the same as the father’s, a note is added in the Comments field.
• Mother — Mother’s Given Name and Maiden Name.
• Town — The Town where the child was born.
• Járás / Meyge — The District and County of birth.
• Comments — Other useful information in the record, such as names of witnesses, or mother and/or father’s town of birth, or indication if the child died, and the date.
• Source — LDS Microfilm Number, used to order the microfilm from the LDS Family History Centers, or other source.
• Record Number — The purpose of the record number is to aid in finding the original record on the microfilm or other source of vital records.  We are now standardizing on the format PPP-NN, where PPP represents the page number within a film, or volume, and NN represents the item number on that page.  Some older records may have the system YYYY-N (where YYYY=the year of the record and N=the record number from that year associated with the record) or simply the number associated with a record for small towns.

Notes on Searching the Database

In addition to the usual search of surnames and towns, you can use the global text search of all fields to find all entries for a particular county (megye), given name, or LDS microfilm number.

If you are searching for a hyphenated town name or county, you must enter only the name before the hyphen or after the hyphen, but not both.  At this time, the search engine is not capable of handling hyphenated names.  JewishGen technicians are working on this problem.

It should be understood by all researchers that these are index files, and no attempt was made to replicate all the data in the original registers.  Researchers should go to the source record, wherever possible, to obtain additional information such as witnesses, notes by the registrar, and other information.

Contents of the Database

There are about 520,000 vital records in the database to date: Approximately 310,000 birth, 60,000 marriage, and 150,000 death records.