With the advent of the Internet and the development of communication technologies, new possibilities for processing historical registry documents have emerged. We decided to research and process the registers of the villages founded by our ancestors in the south of the Great Pannonian Plain - the "low-land country".
How do we proceed with processing?
First of all, we had to create a suitable genealogy program that allowed the coordinated work of a larger number of collaborators.
The processing of matrices themselves can be divided into three stages.
In the first phase, it is the indexing itself - that is, the transcription of all the data from the original document into the genealogical program.
In the second phase, it is then the so-called pairing, ie creating gender links between individual master records.
There are already a number of problems with indexing. Evangelical registries were kept in Latin until the first half of the 19th century. Understanding the written text is a common problem here, especially with regard to the different ways of expressing the date and age, or the texts in the notes. This often includes the "ugly writing" of the pastor or various distortions of Latin expressions. In the Hungarian period (since the end of the first half of the 19th century) the registries are richer in content.
Due to the subsequent pairing, we had to proceed to the so-called standardization of names and surnames. Therefore, we rewrite the name and surname into the database as it is written on the original document, but we also enter the parallel name and surname in the so-called "normalized" form. For a better understanding, I give an example. The common name Ján appears in the matrices we process in 31 different forms, such as Ioannes, Ján, Janči, János, Joan, Joanes, Joannes, Joanness, Johanes, Johannes ....
In order for the program to know that Ján, János, Johannes ... is actually the same name, we proceeded to the normalization of names and surnames. This in turn greatly simplifies the pairing process.
In the second phase (pairing), we then go through the indexed records and try to link them into gender ties. This process is proving to be very strenuous and complex, but it contributes significantly to improving the index itself.
As part of the pairing, various errors are often discovered and corrected, whether they are typographical errors, but also pastoral errors, when comparing records of baptism, marriage, baptism of children and deaths often helps to identify such errors. And I'm not even talking about cases of renaming (change of surname), or when the mother was given the surname of her mother (ie the grandmother) as single instead of her surname.
For better orientation in the processed index, we list some "specialties".
We often correct normalized data in the verification and pairing process. For example, if the baptism record states that the mother's name was Anna and we find out during the pairing and verification process that the mother's name should have been Eva, then we will enter it in the form Eva * - Anna will leave the original data and enter the data in front of him. corrected plus characters * -
We mark * (asterisk) with information that was not in the original document, but we found it in the verification and pairing process (from another document) and added it in this way. For example, he did not have listed parents in the marriage record, but he did have them in the death record - so we added them to the marriage record (but marked *).
We make the first part of our work available to the public - ie the (already corrected) index of individual processed matrices.
So far, we have completely processed the family ties under the registries of Slovenský Komlóš, and before the end, the registries of the municipality of Ambrózfalva.
This project started in 2015 and involves a huge amount of work and especially the time invested. So far, our collaborators have invested more than 35,000 hours of their time in the project, and the most common motivation is to try to thank Mom and Aps for those beautiful memories.
Please approach the published results of our work taking this aspect into account.
