Re: Husz
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In reply to:
Re: Husz
Mary Cantu 1/27/12
Don't know what ethnic background these people are--could be maybe Slovak or Hungarian.If they are Slovak, you'll be able to find excellent help in the Slovak forum.Balint is a fairly common Slovak name--don't know about Hungarian.
One thing that makes things much easier is knowing the village a person came from; that's how information is organized in that part of the world.If you know when a person died (even approximately), you can get a PA death certificate.This sometimes includes the village in which the person was born.You might try contacting Immigration and Naturalization to see if he was naturalized.Declarations of intention for naturalization are great sources of info.
A caution I would add--don't assume that their name stayed completely constant.Central Europe by and large used the Roman alphabet like us.But the sounds for the letters were not always the same as the ones we're used to.People like census workers and court personnel listened to people and wrote what they heard.But they wrote what they heard in English.So you might see something like the name Gres (in my family tree) be written as Gresh or Gresch.There are many other examples.One branch of my Mom's family started with a perfectly good Slovak name; and they now have one that looks German, even though the pronunciation isn't all that different.
Good luck in your hunting!