Amanuensis Monday ~ Bonyhád, Hungary Birth Record

An Amanuensis is a person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.

My husband's mother, known as Bubbie Lena, was born in Bonyhád, Tolna District, Hungary. Bonyhád is 87 miles SSW of Budapest, Hungary. Lena married Josef Händler in Hungary and followed him to America with her first-born son, Arpad in 1911. Those passenger lists were very helpful in providing me with her birthplace and her father's name, Samuel Holländer.

As well as obtaining the book written about Bonyhád, (Bonyhád: a destroyed community: the Jews of Bonyhád, Hungary, by Leslie Blau (1994)), I also found that the Family History Library has a microfilm of Jewish records covering the period from 1851 to 1895, which I borrowed and examined last month.  (Hungarian Civil registration began in October 1895.)

Registers of Jewish births, marriages and deaths for Bonyhád, Tolna, Hungary.
Text in Hungarian and German.
FHL microfilm no. 642923, Family History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

This is the page from the FHL microfilm that shows Lina Hollander's birth record. The headings are in Hungarian and German.

Closeup of the left-hand page:

At the time of this record, the forms were in Hungarian and German. With a little (actually, a lot of) help from Google Translate, I figure the translation is roughly as follows. Handwritten information is in blue.

Year: 1889 
Születési anyakönyv roughly translates as: Birth Registry
Number : 29
The Child's Name: Lina
The Day and Month of Birth: September 5th
Gender: the check mark is under the female column.
Legal; the check mark is in this column (as opposed to the column headed: Illegitimate)
Father's Name, Occupation, and Place of Birth: Hollander, Samuel, Házaló (translates to Peddler), Bonyhád
Mother's Name and Place of Birth: Honenváld, Anna, Hőgyész 
The Child's Parents Home: Bonyhád, 2 [illegible]
The Midwife's Name: Hausner, Berta 

This is wonderful that, not only do I get her mother's maiden name, Anna Honenváld, but I also get her place of birth, Hőgyész, which is 77 miles SSW of Budapest, and about 17 miles NNW of Bonyhád. 

Closeup of the right-hand page:

Geburts Protokoll is German for: Birth Record

The first column asks for information about the circumcision of boy babies and the second column asks for information about the naming of girl babies. Lina's information is in the second column: Bonyhád, September 14th.

The name following the place and date is likely the official (possibly a Rabbi?) who performed the baby naming.



The next column provides the name, occupation and residence of a person associated with the circumcision of a baby boy. Google Translate is not helping here. Following is a column that is entitled: Died, for babies who died within the first week after birth. The last column is for additional notes. 

Update January 3, 2012: After analyzing Lina Hollander's siblings' birth records, I'm not 100% sure on the birth years for each these children of Samuel and Anna.

Amanuensis Monday is a daily blogging prompt from GeneaBloggers, the genealogy community's resource for blogging. It is used by many genealogy bloggers to help them tell stories of their ancestors.