Back To Contents

LOCAL VITAL RECORDS AS RESOURCES

Traditionally the first place you turn in your search for ancestors are the registers of births, deaths, marriages and baptisms. In many countries such data are collected by various state agencies in others this is done by churches. In historical Hungary before 1895 such records were collected by parish offices, thereafter they became collected in a uniform and standardized manner by agencies of the state. The above applies to Slovakia since until about 1920 it was part of Hungary.

While the new agencies started collecting vital records around 1895 the old records, in general, remained in the church offices. This changed after the end of World War Two, when in Slovakia state agencies began to collect such records from the individual parish offices.

I learned during my visit to Slovakia in the Summer of 2000 that these records have been preserved on microfilms and are available for study. The procedure in our case involved the procuring of a copy of a book that gives the locations where records from the individual villages are stored and how can they be accessed. The title of the book is "Cirkevne matriky na Slovensko zu 16. -19. storocia" and was compiled by Jana Sarmanyova (See the List of References for further information.) For us such information was made available at the Regional State Archives in Bratislava (Slovensky Oblastny Archiv v Bratislave), located at Kriskova 7, 81104 Bratislava .

Visiting local cemeteries and deciphering and recording information from decaying grave markers before they completely disintegrate is still another method of retrieving old family data. The remembrances of local elders too might provide missing information and thus should be sought out and recorded. A still further tool could be information collected by family researchers before the confiscation / destruction of vital records during the War and in the post-1945 years. The establishment of a network between members of the Bartalos family might reveal the existence of such unique and irreplaceable data.

Back To Contents