The Kardos Trail, Ep 9, Ancestors as Kiddies

 A lovely discovery: I found a few Kardos kids today. Not real ones. Ancestors.

When Grandad Eugene sailed away from Europe about 1905, about age twenty, I imagined a little gang of family young’uns, admiringly seeing him off. His oldest sister Roza’s kids were Margit, Karoly (Carl or Charles in English) and Paula. Uncle Miksa’s kids were Klara and Margit (their Luiza died at age two).

Yesterday, I was delighted to find two more.

Finding them in the records (if I haven’t made a mistake) is not just good for the story. It’s good for my sentimental hope to someday find living relatives. But, that unlikely event to one side, here are the new missing pieces to our saga.

Eugene’s sister Lujza (which I think is pronounced Luiza) had two kids, Karoly and Olga. There’s more.

Second oldest of her seven siblings, Lujza married a guy named Jakab Neufeld. He seemed to disappear from the records after 1918, and he wasn’t buried with everyone else in Budapest, so I wonder if maybe he died in WW1.

Around that time, the residential records I saw listed all the women in the family and none of the men. It feels like just about everyone was conscripted. Hungary sent a higher proportion of soldiers to that war than most other nations involved, and lost them in the same high proportions. Jeno/Eugene escaped all that, in New York.

He had to register with the US military, although he never served. He had to declare allegiance by becoming a naturalised US citizen in 1914, along with wife Anna. By then they’d been away about ten years. This is when and why they lost their Hungarian citizenship.

 

He and his counterparts back home would not have fought on the same front, I do not think. But their nations were at war. 

Before all that, his sister Lujza married Jakab in 1893, a wedding Jeno may have attended, since he was then age nine. I want to picture hium scowling in an itchy suit, pinched in the cheek by aunties and squirming.

Lujza delivered her son Karoly within a year, and daughter Olga the year after. They’d have been in their early twenties when they lost their dad.

I haven’t found dad Jakab’s grave. Lujza’s buried with the rest of the clan, together with someone who turned out to be her second husband, Kalman Klein. I had no idea she had a second husband. Good for her. What’s more, they both lived nice long lives, nearly to 1940, died a year apart, and are buried together in one tomb, near at least a dozen of their people.

So, the three discoveries in one day were Lujza’s two offspring and a second husband. There are points it’s hard to keep this all straight.

If Lujza is Grandad Eugene’s sister, then she’s my great aunt. Her kids Olga and Karoly, are my cousins, once removed.

If Olga and Karoly lived nice long lives too, the ends of their lives could have overlapped with the start of mine. They could have been somewhere in Budapest, when I visited as a college student. At that point, they’d have been in their 80s, if they were still around. That’s a poignant thought. I wanted to search for them and others, but it wasn’t possible at the time.

Budapest 1977, Budapest 2017

Still, in the late 1970s, on a long college break, I trekked all over Budapest for a few weeks, eating strudel (“retesh”) and goulash, going to museums and concerts, meeting some very friendly art teachers who took me to wonderful folk music dancing clubs, and the whole time I had a sadness saying to me, “I know I have cousins here. I know it. I could be sitting right next to them on a bus, and I’ll never know.”

It’s possible I’ll feel the same way, when I go back, this coming March.

However, if I’m going to imagine youngsters of the past, saying goodbye to Jeno as he embarked to become American Eugene instead, now I can add Olga and Karoly to this mental image.

Here’s the snapshot:

Klara and Margit (Spitzer)were 17 and 15.

Margit the younger, Karoly and Paula (Stark)were 14, 13, and 11.  

Karoly the younger and Olga were 11 and 10.

 

That’s a sweet imaginary photo. I’m fairly sure there is no such real photo, which is perhaps why it’s all the sweeter. 

Did any of these people have offspring? I haven’t found any yet. That’s another question for the Budapest trip, where I will have a lot of help.

Research continues. 

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