Deakins Survey (Locating Military Lots in Western Maryland)--Lessons Learned

The next paragraph is a long introduction.

Most of the branches of my family tree can be traced back within about four generations to specific locations in Europe. Details can be viewed most easily by following the links from my profile at the single-tree WikiTree. My maternal grandmother's branch, however, is much more complicated. My grandmother was born in Frostburg, Maryland, as was her mother. Their maternal root, Ellen (Powers) Brooks, is firmly planted at a specific location in Ireland. But several years after Ellen's childhood family moved to Frostburg she married George Brooks. George, my great-great-grandfather, has deep roots in the western panhandle of Maryland, going back well into the 1700s. My family knew almost nothing about the George Brooks branch before I started researching about 25 years ago. It turns out that there are multiple great-somebody connections scattered on both sides of the Old National Pike from Frostburg west. In recent years during my trips back East, genealogy has been an excuse to spend time exploring and enjoying the scenery and history of the mountains, particularly the mountains of Western Maryland. So this long introduction has been an explanation for my interest in locating military lots on modern topographic maps.

The Western Maryland Historical Library has a web page devoted to the Deakins Survey. Hereinafter that page and its links will be the Library website. I won't repeat the information and explanation provided at the Library website. Their main page has a map of the military lots for Garrett County. Multiple horizontal and vertical lines divide that map into small rectangular sections. Clicking anywhere on that map will zoom in on only the small rectangle clicked on. Regarding the Garrett map, the Library website provides a link to the "Full Military Land Map (without lines)". That full image can be downloaded and viewed at full resolution in its entirety offline. But that won't be necessary for following this post. I have cropped the full downloaded image and kept only a northwest corner of the map. Here is that portion.

Deakins Map Redrawn, Cropped, northwest corner of Garrett County

You may want to download this northwest corner map and look at it offline while continuing to read this post. The Library website explains that the map for Garrett County was redrawn from an earlier map (the Veatch map) that covers both today's Garrett County and today's Allegany County east to Cumberland. The Library website includes a link to the Veatch map, which is a color image. I would suggest instead viewing a black and white version of the Veatch map. A link to the B&W version is provided at a web page discussing use of the Deakins Survey in researching the Corn (Korn) family. The B&W version is described there more correctly as a grayscale version. The Corn website also provides additional information and discussion about the Deakins Survey. For the purpose of this blog, I have cropped the B&W version of the Veatch map and kept only the same northwest corner (also cropping some notations on the northern and western margins). Here it is.

Deakins Map, Original Veatch version converted to grayscale, Cropped

The reason the original Veatch map is in color is because some military lots were surveyed with settlers already present. Those lots were then offered for sale to the original settlers, and so they were not available for distribution to soldiers. A red shading was applied to the original settler lots on the Veatch map, often making the lot numbers difficult to read. In the gray scale version the numbers are still somewhat smeared and faded, but a bit easier to read. My g-g-grandfather George's g-grandfather, Thomas Humbertson, was one of the original-settler purchasers in the Frostburg area.

On the two maps above there are large swaths covered by fairly uniform grids of rectangular, not quite square, lots. Similar rectangular lots appear in many areas of the rest of the survey. A starting point for locating specific lots is to understand that the rectangular shape of the lots is related to their areal size, 50 acres. One square mile is 640 acres, and 50 does not divide evenly into 640. However an old measurement unit is a perch, or rod, which is equal to 16.5 feet. A rectangular lot that is 80 perches (1320 feet) by 100 perches (1650 feet) is exactly 50 acres.

Ultimately the goal is to approximately locate these lots on a modern topographic map. Most of the area in the two maps above is covered by the USGS Friendsville topographic map. (An electronic version of the Friendsville map can be downloaded for free from the USGS Store, when the government is not shut down. The latest version of the traditional form of the Friendsville topo is the 1993 version.) I have a paper copy of the Friendsville topo that I bought from the USGS about 25 years ago. Since I know that the paper copy is printed at a scale of 1:24,000, I have drawn on a separate little sheet of paper a grid of rectangular military lots at 1:24,000, like this.

I overlay my little grid on the topo map and see how it fits (a bit like solving a jigsaw puzzle). Even when lots have irregular shapes, I know that the area enclosed needs to be the same area as my hand-drawn rectangles. You can confirm the shape and size of the rectangular lots by looking at the B&W Veatch map above. The circles along the north and west boundaries are one mile apart. Four lots added along their short sides is exactly one mile. Four lots added along their long sides equals the length of five lots added along their short sides, etc. It's easy to measure mileage south from the Mason-Dixon line. Just count the number of short sides and divide by four. The complication is the first row of lots, along the M-D line. Those lots appear wider in the long direction, and so must be narrower in the short direction. I estimate the inflation factor in the long direction as 7/6, and so the reduction in the short direction 6/7, so the north-south distance of the top row is approximately 0.21 mile instead of 0.25 mile.

Let's see how this works for an example. My 4th-great uncle (i.e, George Brooks' uncle) Noah Humberson acquired several parcels of land in the Blooming Rose area beginning about 1860. His 1860 purchase is described in part as including military lots 2842, 2843 and 2844. The lot numbers are easier to read on the first (Deakins Redrawn) map above. The irregular shape of lot 2844 is better depicted on the Veatch B&W map. On either map you can see that the three lots partially wrap around the north end of the Blooming Rose tract. Consider the corner where the three lots meet. How far south of the state line (the Mason-Dixon line) is this corner? Count north 10 lots along their short side. Ten divided by four is 2.5 miles. Add the top row estimate, 0.21 mile, to get a total of 2.71 miles as the approximate answer. When I measure this distance south, and consider the approximate location of the Blooming Rose tract, I find a point on the southwest edge of a short ridge labeled on the topo map as Emberson Hill. I have not been able to locate a description of the Blooming Rose tract, but I suspect that the north end of the tract follows the Emberson Hill ridge line for a short distance, cutting into what would have been a perfectly rectangular lot 2844. To compensate, lot 2844 then extends south of the ridge line.

Regarding the east-west positioning of military lots on a modern topo, I repeatedly fall for the notion when looking across the top of the Veatch map that the numbers labeling the circles indicate mileage along the Mason-Dixon (hereinafter M-D) line. But that is false, it does not fit. The circles are one mile apart, but they are not the exact M-D mileage.

In 1859 a brother of Noah, Azariah Humberston, purchased military lots 2936 and 2939, and a western part of military lot 3330. These lots are located just south and southeast of the circle labeled 196 on the Veatch map. Comparing with the Deakins redrawn map, you can see that this is an example where the digit six has been miscopied as a zero. (Miscopying is mentioned at the Library website.) So lot 2936 appears incorrectly as a second lot 2930 on the Deakins redrawn map. The excerpt below from the Friendsville topo includes the area of Azariah's purchase.

The total north-south distance on this excerpt is about 1.5 miles. Maryland state route 42, near the left edge, continues north to Markleysburg. The other north-south road crossing the state line, a secondary road a little right of center, is identified by google maps as Guard Road. I'm reluctant to draw Azariah's lots on this map because I can't be sure of the precise location. I know that the north boundary of lots 2936 and 2939 is only about 1/5 mile south of the state line. I play with my hand drawn grid of lots overlaid on the paper version of the map. Notice that some features are colored purple. Those features are photo revisions. Notice the photorevised road that veers to the south off of Guard Road, curves west, descends a steep hill via a switchback, and arrives at a photorevised lake. I believe that Azariah's lots 2936 and 2939 encompass most of these photorevisions, with room to spare on the west. How did I arrive at this east-west position? For one thing, it fits with the earlier positioning on Emberson Hill. It also fits with the position of the Youghiogheny River near Friendsville. (The drainage pattern sketched on the Deakins Map Redrawn provides a broad perspective on the area location, but details of the stream courses are in many places very wrong. At Friendsville, which developed in part from the land patent labeled "Look Sharp", the approximate location of the river is determined by the lot boundaries.)

It is possible to locate the M-D mileage on this and other topo maps for western Maryland, but it's complicated. Looking at the topo excerpt above along the M-D line we see the number 220 (a bit east of highway 42) and the number 218 (near the top of a hill that lies north of my estimated location of Azariah's lots). These are monument numbers, not distances. The numbers are from a list of monuments installed or repaired or merely noted during a resurvey of the M-D line conducted in the years 1901-1903. The report of the resurvey is available as a 23 MB pdf download from the Mason and Dixon Line Preservation Partnership website. The list of monuments appears on pages 83 through 101 of the report. For the first (eastern) 132 miles of the M-D line the list of monuments is almost entirely the milestones. Monument number 136 is milestone number 132, indicating only 3 extra resurvey monuments in that distance (resurvey monument no. 1 being M-D's initial monument). Partially quoting from the resurvey's description of number 136, Near the eastern base of Sideling Hill ... the most western of the [milestone] monuments planted by Mason and Dixon... West of this point M-D installed makeshift monuments of rock cairns or mounds of earth.

Moving ahead in the list of monuments, arriving at monuments in the area of the topo map above: 217. Small mound of stones, with a good sized tree growing in it, on the east side of [Guard Road] ... This marks the 196th mile of Mason and Dixon's measurement, 193 miles from the initial monument ... 218. Stone monument in fence line on the high bare ridge one-fifth of a mile west of the preceding mound ... The distance on the topo map from the east side of Guard Road to the number 218 is slightly more than, but about, one-fifth of a mile. As a consequence of my east-west fitting described previously, I estimate that the point labeled 196 on the Veatch map is actually the 196.35 mile of Mason and Dixon's measurement. The 0.35 mile adjustment is a bit more than the width of one of the rectangular 50 acre lots. This adjustment should work anywhere along the northern border of the Veatch map.

(This paragraph and the final paragraph discuss the eastern, beyond Garrett, part of the Deakins Survey. The small portion of the Veatch map displayed above will no longer be of use. You may want to download the relevant maps from elsewhere, or you can just imagine.) Moving 27 miles to the east, and quoting again from the resurvey report, 179. Stone monument in mound of earth on the western edge of the summit of Big Savage Mountain. This mound marked the 169th mile of Mason and Dixon's measurement ... This is the most eastern of these 'mile mounds.' (Note that I've calculated the distance from Guard Road as 27 miles by subtracting the 169th mile from the 196th mile. The difference in monument numbers is 38.) This monument and the next 11 resurvey monuments to the east (numbers 178-168, extending over about 8 miles) are all labeled with their numbers on either the Frostburg or the Cumberland topo maps. None of the monuments 178-168 are at locations that could have been mile mounds. In other words, the resurvey would have determined that they had arrived at locations where there could have been mile mounds. But finding no evidence that M-D had marked the spots, the resurvey also did not mark or remark upon those spots. Instead the resurvey installed stone monuments at more prominent locations, such as beside a north-south road or on a mountain ridgetop. Most of those resurvey monument locations had remnant evidence of having been marked by M-D.

In the resurvey's listing of monuments, after number 136 (the most western of the milestone monuments planted by M-D) all the way to number 179 (the most eastern of the M-D mile mounds), the monument descriptions for 137 through 178 say nothing about the M-D mileage. So even though the monuments covering the easternmost seven miles of the Deakins survey, numbers 162-178, can be located precisely on a modern topo map, there are no associated mileages in the monument descriptions. There is nothing for the estimated adjustment to be applied to. But it should be possible to extrapolate east from monument 179. For example, applying the estimated adjustment to the point at monument 179, the 169th M-D mile, yields 168.65 mile for the Veatch map (i.e., Veatch 169 is estimated 0.35 miles west of monument 179). On the Frostburg topo I measure 1.65 miles east from resurvey monument 179 and so arrive at a point estimated as the point 167 found on the northern edge of the Veatch map. This point is close to the eastern edge of the Frostburg topo, and is two miles north of Mount Savage. If the locations of the military lots surveyed in the vicinity of Mount Savage were not already known, steps analogous to those outlined above could be used to approximately locate those lots.

The Brown Family, The Monongahela, and The Two Alicias

The family homestead of William Hughey Brown, 1815-1875 (his Find A Grave Memorial), was situated along the Monongahela River, about five miles east of downtown Pittsburgh. William Hughey and his sons were coal operators. In particular, they pioneered shipping of coal by barge along the Pittsburgh rivers, and soon expanded their business down along the Ohio and the Mississippi. An 1889 posthumous biographical sketch of William tries to counter the impression that the Brown family wealth was acquired through government contracts during the Civil War, arguing that William was already prosperous before the war. Still it seems that business during the Civil War must have been as profitable as it was exciting and dangerous.

Several years ago someone compiled a comprehensively illustrated ebook genealogical history of the W. H. Brown family. That ebook at times could be accessed publicly online, but I don't know where it may be found now. You can follow the descendants of William Hughey Brown through the links from his Find A Grave Memorial to memorials for family members. You can do the same from his WikiTree Profile (currently only a few generations there) or from his profile at Family Search. (The latter link requires a free account registration and login. Also note that at FamilySearch William Hughey has been recorded as William Henry.) The links to individuals below are to their Find A Grave memorials.

This post is the first of what eventually will be a series of posts here, with the common thread being that there is some connection, even if tenuous, between the story of the Browns and the story of my family tree. Several of the threads deserve their own posts. This page is an introduction, with many details to be filled in later.

When William Hughey Brown died in 1875, there were four surviving sons. The oldest was Samuel Smith Brown, 1842-1905, (Samuel S.) and the youngest was William Harry Brown, 1856-1921, (W. Harry). One of the middle sons died in 1882, and then Samuel and Harry bought out the other middle son, leaving Samuel S. and W. Harry in charge of the family enterprises.

Brownsville, where I grew up, is also situated on the Monongahela, about 30 miles in a straight line south of downtown Pittsburgh, but about 55 miles upstream following the curving river. There is no evidence that the William Hughey Brown family was related in any way to the Browns who founded Brownsville in 1785. But it might be imagined that as attention turned to coal resources along the upstream Monongahela, the Pittsburgh Browns would be intrigued by a community named Brownsville. Sometime before Samuel died, he and Harry acquired coal property just southwest of Brownsville. Somewhat unusually for coal operators, the Browns' acquisition included much of the surface property several hundred feet above the coal beds. Today a big chunk of that surface property is the 467 acre Patsy Hillman Park.

Shortly after Samuel died, W. Harry Brown developed the coal part of their property near Brownsville, naming the mine Alicia, presumably after his daughter Mary Alice. About 10 years later Harry developed a second Alicia mine, about 12 miles farther south. The ebook genealogical history describes how Harry at his office in Pittsburgh closely supervised the architectural and engineering details of the two Alicias. A few years before Harry died, he sold his business interests to Pittsburgh Steel Company, which at its Monessen mill was already Harry's main customer. By 1936 the original Alicia was mined out. The surface properties there passed to the Hillman family. Probably not coincidentally, beginning in 1936 John Hartwell Hillman Jr. is listed among the members of Pittsburgh Steel's board of directors. In 1954 the Hillman Family Foundation presented to Brownsville much of the Brown->Hillman surface property, to be used as a community park. For several decades it was known as the Brownsville-Luzerne Community Park, but it is now Patsy Hillman Park. Below is a telephoto view taken almost 50 years ago looking northeast from the flagpole hill near the center of the park.

On the right side of this view is a water reservoir for Brownsville. Toward the left, on the far side of the Monongahela, is Krepps Knob, at 1350 feet one of the highest hilltops in the vicinity. Looking back toward the reservoir, heading on a straight line past the left side of the reservoir then down a steep hill on the other side would bring you to 770 feet at the river's edge. There you would be among the Bridgeport Patch houses, where my Hungarian grandparents raised their family. Back up at 1100 feet, visible on the left is a relatively flat area that is today's park soccer fields. Beyond the right side of this view there were other ameneties (e.g, golf driving range, kiddieland carnival rides) that came and went in the first decade or so of the park.

Let's go back to Samuel S. Brown. If you look at his Wikipedia page, you'll see there are only two sentences about the family coal business. Samuel was much better known nationally as an owner of racehorses, and a promoter of interest in that sport. His New York Times obituary (link is on the wikipedia page) reports that, His stables and stock farms were at Brownsville, Penn., and Lexington, Ky. In 1904 J. Percy Hart published Hart's History and Directory of the Three Towns (Brownsville, Bridgeport, West Brownsville). Hart's History has a biographical sketch for Samuel, as well as a separate portrait of Samuel with a caption. Much of Hart's sketch is taken from a sketch that had appeared in a Pitsburgh paper earlier in 1904, and both sketches dwell mostly on Samuel's racing interests. Hart's 1904 caption for the portrait reads, Capt. Samuel S. Brown, Who Owns A Stock Farm Just Above Bridgeport--the Home of "Troubadour." The Area of this Farm is 999 1/2 Acres, Underlaid with Coal. It took me awhile to connect the dots--obviously Just Above Bridgeport is today's community park. So as a child, when approaching The Park what I was feeling must have been the spirit of old Troubadour grazing in the grass-covered hills.

More 1930 Slovakia Census, An Index for Two Hungarian Villages

As mentioned at the beginning of the previous post, I've been reviewing the 1930 census sheets from my grandfather's home village of Nagy Szelmenc and the adjacent village Kis Szelmenc (Czech/Slovak Veľké and Malé Slemence). I've now completed an index of selected information from those census sheets. More about that farther down in this post. But first, in the next few paragraphs, I'd like to restate a few main points from that previous post, maybe more clearly this time.

In that previous post the main main point is the embedded image, which is a map from a 1921 history of Czechoslovakia. The map displays the eastern half of the Czechoslovakia that existed before World War II. The image title states, in Czech/Slovak, that the map is of Slovakia (Slovensko) and of Subcarpathian Rus' (Podkarpatská Rus). A solid bold line encompasses the two areas; together they were the eastern part of pre-WWII Czechoslovakia. A dashed bold line divides the two areas. (The breaks are very short; takes awhile to recognize it as a dashed line.) The figure, from wikimedia commons, is repeated below.

On the map the county of Užhorod is labeled in all caps. A much smaller label, in upper and lower case, marks the city of Užhorod. The dashed line follows a tight nearly three-quarter circle around the city. The western border of today's Transcarpathia lies a few to several miles west of this 1921 wavy dashed line. Transcarpathia extends slightly farther west than the interwar Podkarpatská Rus; they are not the same thing. Equivalently, the Slovakia part of pre-WWII Czechoslovakia extended several miles farther east than today's Slovakia. About this interwar dividing line—when was it first established as the western boundary of an intended semi-autonomous Ruthenian region, which country did that, and what were they thinking, why the waviness? That is a story for another time.

The final main point is that before WWII Czechoslovakia conducted two censuses of the country, one in 1921 and the second in 1930. For each of the two areas on this map, the process of restoring, digitizing and making the census images available online has so far been conducted for only one of the census years. For Podkarpatská Rus it is the 1921 census that is available online; the 1930 census is not available. Conversely for pre-WWII Slovakia it is the 1930 census that is available online; 1921 is not available.

Now back to my index of the two Szelemenc/Slemence villages in 1930. I've placed the index on google drive in three formats: (1) the Numbers file from my Mac laptop; (2) an xlsx file exported from Numbers; and (3) a CSV file exported from Numbers. Although the columns of the index are mostly self-explanatory, some additional explanation may help. Along with the explanations will be hints and lessons learned from working with this 1930 Slovakia census.

In the first column, Sheet, the leading number 317 was assigned by the archives to the box in which those sheets had been stored. The number after the slash was assigned to that sheet when the restoration process began. A small, white, scanable and human-readable label was attached near the top right corner of each sheet, and is visible in the online images. These box/sheet numbers are a modern creation, unknown in 1930. The box/sheet number can be used in the search field at the Slovakiana site. To aid the search results, occasionally it may be necessary to add a comma, a space and the first letter of the village's Slovak name (in this case M or V) in the search field. For example "317/92, V", without the quotes. The front of a sheet holds information for up to nine persons; if all nine rows are filled, click the right arrow to check if there are more persons on the back of the sheet. The House Number is as recorded by the enumerator. I don't know if these numbers were pre-assigned on a map, or if the enumerator simply entered a number in order of visitation. Kis Szelmenc (Malé Slemence) had its own set of house numbers, 1-59, which appear in reverse numerical order when viewed by Sheet order 317/1-59. Nagy Szelmenc (Veľké Slemence) was a bigger village, spanning sheets 317/60-248. Nagy Sz. has two sets of house numbers 1 through 28. The second set 1-28 was recorded for the Roma (gypsy, Hungarian cigány) neighborhood(s). What I call Head is the person on the first line of the census sheet, even though sometimes the situation was more complicated. The religion columns will be discussed in later paragraphs. Online the Slovakiana site also has summary sheets from 1930. The numbers in the last column of my index indicate that the summary sheets for this area had been stored in box 1201. (Subtotal summaries for other villages in the area include: Palad' 1201/28-29, Ptruska 1201/32-33, Ruská 1201/34-36, Vajany 1201/41-42, etc.) The information on these summary sheets is roughly the second, third, fourth, sixth and seventh columns of my index. The summary sheets also contain hand calculations of subtotals and grand totals. It appears that these summary sheets must have been folded into four-page booklets. When unfolded, the first and last pages appear on the first scanned page; click the right arrow to view the inside pages. The population total in 1930 for Malé Slemence was 303 and for Veľké Slemence it was 892. My great-grandfather is on sheet 317/61.

The 1930 Czechoslovakia census forms included columns for nationality and for religious affiliation. The vast majority of individuals in the Szelmenc'es were recorded as Hungarian. I've noted the rare instances when someone was recorded as Slovak or Czechoslovak. I've also noted when the nationality was recorded as cigány. There are two clusters of these, sheets 317/151-165 and then sheets 317/184-196. Everyone in these clusters was recorded as cigány. Conversely, no one outside of these clusters was recorded as cigány. For all those with Jewish religious affiliation, recorded either with the older Hungarian term izraelita by enumerator II or with the term zsidó by enumerator I, their nationality was recorded as zsidó (thus that entry in the notes column would be redundant). I suspect that many of the Roma and Jews would have thought of their nationality foremost as Hungarian, having ancestors who lived for centuries in the Hungarian part of Austria/Austria-Hungary, but had no choice how they were recorded.

Long before the 1930 census became available, I perused the information in the 1877 Dvorszák Gazetter, images available online from the University of Pécs. See this 2012 blog post, Boundaries of some Greek-Catholic Parishes in Old Hungary as well as my grandfather's wikitree page. For each village the 1877 Gazeteer provides population totals broken down by religious affiliation. Here are the 1877 numbers for Nagy Szelmenc (p. 738): Greek Catholic 314; Roman Catholic 175; Reformed 200; Jewish 69. Adding, the total population in 1877 was 758, slightly less than 1930's 892. The breakdown in 1930, from my index: Greek Catholic 385; Roman Catholic 268; Reformed 208; Jewish 30; Unstated 1. It's interesting to notice that in 1930 nearly 100 households subscribed to multiple Christian denominations. (For example, if the 1920 US census had recorded religious affiliation by baptism, my Dad's childhood family would have been 4 GC, 1 RC.)

I often explain to people that Toth is a very common Hungarian surname (and that Hungarian o, with or without an accent mark, is always pronounced like the o in both). The commonness holds true within the two 1930 Szelmenc villages, where 24 households were headed by a Toth.

Subcarpathian Rus'--Loose Mentions and Misunderstandings

This post is a follow-on to my reviewing of the 1930 census sheets from my grandfather's home village of Nagy Szelmenc and the adjacent village Kis Szelmenc (Czech/Slovak Veľké and Malé Slemence). About two years ago the 1930 census became available online, following a 90-year privacy period.¹ I was slow to realize that the information was available, but have now updated several WikiTree pages, including those for my grandfather's brothers and their father, and for my grandmother's sister in Csap. I'll have more to say about that 1930 census itself, including lessons learned, in a later post.

Intending to summarize some of the information, but also wanting to avoid reinventing the wheel, I searched for what other people have been doing with this 1930 census. In the process, which has included following links to descriptions of the history of the area, I've found that many play fast and loose with terms they use to label broad and narrow regions, glossing over context and time, substituting alternatives as if they were equivalent synonyms from a thesaurus. There is a lot of history, with many labels. But my concern for this post is about the early censuses from Czechoslovakia, and thus is limited to two time periods. The first period is 1921-1930, when the censuses were conducted. The second period is now and recent decades, when the information has been made available.

I found this map at wikimedia commons.

The map is from a 1921 history of Czechoslovakia. The broken line boundary through the county of Užhorod separates two parts of Czechoslovakia. On the west is the Slovakia (Slovensko) part. On the east is the Subcarpathian Rus' (Podkarpatská Rus) part. Notable on the map around the city of Užhorod is how the boundary forms a tight nearly three-quarter circle around the city. The term Subcarpathian Rus' has been reasonably applied by many people to a broader area based on their analyses of earlier reported ethnicities. But for the purpose of discussing the census records, it is the area as shown on this map, which was defined in the establishing treaties and founding documents for Czechoslovakia. As I understand, within Podkarpatská Rus there were numerous internal rearrangements of county and district boundaries between 1921 and 1930, but the western boundary of Podkarpatská Rus remained the same in 1930 as it had been in 1921.

Then there is the border today, which has not changed since 1945. When Stalin annexed Transcarpathia to the Ukrainian part of the Soviet Union, the border line was straightened and moved comfortably west of the city of Užhorod. Transcarpathia is slightly larger than Podkarpatská Rus; they are not the same area. Podkarpatská Rus is not Czech for Transcarpathia. According to Google Translate: Czech for Transcarpathia is Zakarpatí; Slovak for Transcarpathis is Zakarpatsko.

It is the position of the Slovak National Archives that census sheets from 1930 stored by them are only from present-day Slovakia.¹ Yet it is clear that the 1930 census sheets made available online by the Slovak National Education Center at their Slovakiana site include all of Slovensko as it was in 1930, which includes the far western part of today's Transcarpathia. The Slovakiana site does not include Podkarpatská Rus.¹

I don't know if the census sheets for Podkarpatská Rus were at some point transferred from Czechoslovakia to Transcarpathia, or if the Podkarpatská Rus sheets were always stored there and remained there as part of Transcarpathia. At any rate, in 2017 the Budapest Capital Archives went to the Beregszász (Berehove) section of the Transcarpathian State Archives and digitized the 1921 census sheets for Podkarpastká Rus. The digitized sheets are available online. That online collection is not a 1921 census for Transcarpathia. It is the 1921 census for Podkarpatská Rus.

Reference 1. Email responses from the Slovak National Archives archiv.sna@minv.sk and the Slovak National Education Center slovakiana@nocka.sk to questions from Jim Toth, October 2022.

Browsing a GEDCOM File

A GEDCOM file is the standard for sharing genealogical information. The version 5.5.1 specification is old, but still widely used. A GEDCOM file is generally understood to be intended for output from one computer program, then input to another computer program. But the GEDCOM file is plain text. The file's contents can be browsed that way, and that may be the only way to see all the details that were output by the generating program.

At GitHub I have a little macOS app that I use to browse GEDCOM files. Some of my GEDCOM files are very old, sent by cousins when I first got into genealogy over 20 years ago. Some of the files were created only recently, when I downloaded information from WikiTree and from Ancestry. (It is the standard, so a GEDCOM file is what you get when you download your tree from somewhere.)

Why not just use a plain-text editor for browsing? Discussion follows this screenshot of the app.

In this example the opened file is my tree downloaded from Ancestry. That tree was created by me to aid Ancestry-DNA matches in determining common ancestors. Because of that sole purpose this file contains records for only 37 individuals (35 of them my known ancestors) in 18 families. (My private GEDCOM file on my personal computer has about 1500 individuals.) A single record in a GEDCOM file generally contains multiple lines. The beginning of a new record is indicated by, among other things, a zero as the first character on a line. Though not obvious from the screenshot, the entire opened file can be scrolled from beginning to end in the view on the left. I've scrolled to the point where the beginning of the record for Ann Cavanaugh, one of my great-great-grandmothers, is displayed. Having clicked on the "Process" button, the file has been separated into records which are sorted and selectable in the four views on the right. I can easily jump from one record to another. In the list of individual records I've selected Ann Cavanaugh--much easier selecting that one record than searching for and scrolling to Ann in the original file. But what if Ann had been in a file with thousands of individuals? I would have switched temporarily to sort the list of individuals by surname.

Each record in a GEDCOM file starts with a unique cross-reference label. Ancestry has generated very long cross-references for the individual records. Ann's individual record indicates that she is a spouse in family F17. Having selected F17 in the list of families, we can see that that family record is linked back to Ann's individual record--a two-way link between individual and family record, as required by GEDCOM. My little app is oblivious to most of GEDCOM's requirements and recommendations. Basically all it does is display whatever the content happens to be for each record.

While preparing this post and reviewing the earliest version of this screenshot, I noticed that there were too many families and individuals--duplicates and even triplicates, with the extras differing in having mangled links. Here is how I think that happened. Before last December I had already enjoyed connecting with DNA-test-match cousins at other sites. Worried that I might be missing something at Ancestry, last December I took advantage of their DNA test sale. Preparing for anticipated new connections I created for the first time at Ancestry my tree, adding only my ancestors, one at a time. After that I succumbed to the allure of confirming Ancestry's hints. I think that is how the extra, mangled relationships were generated. After several iterations of deletions and repairs, my tree is back to what I originally intended. So the point is, downloading and browsing of a GEDCOM file can help find problems that are not obvious using the vendor's interface.

I prefer WikiTree. These days my genealogical research results get transferred directly to WikiTree, either by updating existing WikiTree profiles, collaboratively if possible, or sometimes by adding new profiles there. The GitHub link for my GEDCOM Browser app has a README file on its main page which contains a screenshot similar to the one on this page. In the GitHub screenshot the file is a GEDCOM that I downloaded from WikiTree. In that file I've also selected Ann Cavanaugh for illustration, so the two screenshots can be compared and contrasted. The contrasts between a WikiTree GEDCOM and an Ancestry GEDCOM illustrate that there is a great deal of flexibility in how information can be organized in a GEDCOM file. That flexibility can be a hindrance when importing a GEDCOM from somewhere else.

There is a problem with GEDCOM files generated by WikiTree that transcends whether WikiTree follows the spirit of the GEDCOM law. The problem is well explained in this Tamura Jones web page from over five years ago. WikiTree exports the entire biographical section of a profile as one long note in the individual's GEDCOM record. A large number of continuation lines are needed. WikiTree breaks a line and continues on the next line when the line length is well short of the limit specified by GEDCOM. All of that is within the letter of the GEDCOM law. The problem comes when a two-byte UTF-8 character (for example, an accented letter in a Hungarian name, or an educated quotation mark) happens to straddle the arbitrary number of bytes where WikiTree breaks the line. A malformed UTF-8 file is generated. Fortunately my Mac text editor of choice follows orders when I tell it to open the file as UTF-8, but it complains and warns me, highlighting the problem spots. So it was relatively easy to manually repair the file. I only recently experimented with downloading GEDCOM from WikiTree, and it was surprising to eventually discover that the malformed UTF-8 problem had been identified five years ago and never fixed.

My Grandparents' European Neighborhood

On my mother's side of the family tree there are paper trails going back five generations. And over the last few decades I've visited several of those maternal ancestral locations, both in the United States and in Ireland. My father's side is in some ways simpler, but in many ways much more complex. This post will be about where my paternal grandparents came from.

On that paternal side I am only two generations removed from Europe. When my grandparents left in 1905, each only age 15, their native region was then far from any international border. Today that area is the meeting point of three countries: Ukraine, Slovakia and Hungary. Eight years ago I traveled to Hungary and approached the old neighborhood, getting close to the border but staying on the Hungary side. Since then I had an urge to get closer, but did not feel comfortable about traveling in Ukraine on my own, especially to the rural villages. I eventually signed up for a tour of Ukraine. The tour operator offered an add-on, which I took advantage of. After the regular tour ended in Lviv in late October, a driver and the tour guide took me southwest to Uzhhorod in Transcarpathia, and from there to my grandparents' villages.

About five months ago, in the previous post here, I focused on the topography of the Carpathian Mountains, zooming in on the rural area which the regular tour had visited. When writing that previous post I had been intending that for this post at this point I would simply share recent pictures from western Transcarpathia. But in the meantime Russia began attacking Ukraine. We've been reminded that the four countries bordering Transcarpathia are all members of NATO. Autocratic leaders in Russia and in Hungary have amplified their nationalistic xenophobic propaganda to justify and maintain their corrupt holds on power. So it now seems impossible to show recent pictures without dwelling a bit on the history and politics of the area. I'll do the travelogue and the ruminating together, intermingled, beginning by going back to the previous post.

I'm kind of proud of how the first figure in that previous post, the unzoomed-in version, displays the broad arc of the Carpathians while at the same time highlighting small-scale drainage features. You might want to click on that image in the previous post and keep the image open in a separate window. From now on I'll call that image "the topo map." The area of the topo map was mostly beyond the influence of the Roman Empire, even at its greatest extent. As Christianity expanded, missionaries entered the area. Over several centuries they obtained mixed and limited results. Ultimately, over a period of only three decades ending in the year 1000, the Pope and his counterpart in Constantinople made individual deals with each of the rulers of three kingdoms. Each of the three kingdoms extended beyond the topo map to broader areas: Poland to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and Hungary to the southwest. Thus the topo map is comprised of what were fringe territories of the three newly recognized kingdoms. The kingdom of Russia was headquartered at Kyiv; Moscow was then just a backwoods trading post, and remained that way for another 500 years. The part of today's Ukraine that is on the topo map (excluding Transcarpathia) first came under the yoke of Moscow's tyranny in September 1939 (see for example Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands).

As I've gotten into genealogy and DNA testing for genealogy, I realize more and more that there is a difference between ethnicity and ancestry composition. My grandparents and their relatives and friends who immigrated to America over a hundred years ago were very much ethnic Hungarian. They had grown up in the southwest part of the area that today is Ukraine's Transcarpathia. But from 1867 until the end of World War I the area that is today's Transcarpathia was in the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary. In 1867 Austria had turned the clock back to the year 1000 by granting a great deal of autonomy to a partially restored Kingdom of Hungary. The Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary covered all of Sub-Carpathia (the inside of the arc of the Carpathians) including not just today's Transcarpathia but today's Slovakia and the northwest part of today's Romania. Enlightened Hungarian leaders of the 1870's recognized that their Kingdom was multi-ethnic and multi-cultural, and required respect for everyone. But by the time my grandparents were born, a policy of Magyarization (Hungarianization) had taken hold.

Tensions were already rising before 1918, and after 1918 many things happened in the area that is today's Transcarpathia. My grandparents never went back after 1905. A few old papers remain, financial and vital records, that document international mail exchanges into the 1920's. But after that decade contact was lost between my grandparents and the old country.

In today's Uzhhorod I saw no evidence of accomodating two languages. But in the villages closer to the border with Hungary it's clear that to this day many consider themselves ethnic Hungarian. It was fun to pretend to be trilingual, at least for the purpose of reading the place names and "Welcome To Our Community."

My grandmother was born in Chop (Чoп, Csap), and her mother was born across the river in Zahony. Eight years ago on the rental agreement I specified that I would not take the car out of Hungary. My plan had been that after parking the car in Zahony, Hungary, I would take the very short local train ride across the river and then from the train station walk the old main street of Csap. But the ticket agent at the Zahony station said that nothing was available until three days later, and I had plans to be across the country by then. This past October I finally made it to Csap. Below are views looking both directions along the street from near the corner where I think my grandmother's family lived.

It was a very quiet fall Saturday morning. The JewishGen page for Chop has map links, a historical summary and many old and new photos, including some of the Roman Catholic church which my grandmother would have attended. The current church is dated 1903 by the inscription above the main entrance. The morning sun gave a glare to the picture there; I like this one better from the side. I'm standing on the grounds of a very large building that is labeled community center, but looks like it could have once been a school.

Szürte is situated about halfway between my grandmother's Csap and my grandfather's Szelmenc. My grandfather's mother was Barbara Meszaros; we don't know anything else about her, presumably from Szürte like the other Meszaros's. Except for getting out for the picture earlier above with the west side entrance sign, my other pictures of Szürte were taken through the window of the car. I'll leave detailing Szürte itself to my Meszaros cousins.

Szürte is near the north-south main highway connecting Uzhhorod with the border crossing at Csap/Zahony. As in Csap, the buildings in Szürte appear from the outside to be well maintained. But that gets left behind when heading to my grandfather's area. Getting there requires traveling west from Szürte, and very quickly you are in the middle of nowhere. In the two pictures below, especially the first one, the Carpathian mountains can be seen on the distant horizon.

Some potholes were so large that if Russia were to bomb the road it would be hard to tell. Speaking of Moscow, visible in the second photo are the remains of a collective farm, out in the middle of nowhere. Previously the tour guide had pointed out other such remnants, but they were close to main roads, with houses around. I knew that when the Soviet Union took control of Transcarpathia after World War II resistance had been violently suppressed. For example, Greek Catholic priests had been murdered. Still it was disturbing, and remains so, to see physical remnants of that time so close to locales on my family tree. I can even see what looks like a guard tower at a prison. It's reminders like that that have Ukrainians determined to recover their territory currently occupied by Russia. The Ukrainians concern is about more than just which accent or dictionary will prevail.

The name Szelmenc is not derived from Hungarian. Instead, according to the town history a Polish Count received a grant of land from the Pope in the 1300's. The Count's name as it was converted into Hungarian became Szelmenc. (In Hungarian, the combination sz is pronounced s; an s without a z is pronounced sh. The c at the end gets a ts sound). As often happened with other villages in Hungary, over time the Count's property was developed into two adjacent settlements: Little Szelmenc and Big Szelmenc, in Hungarian Kis- and Nagy-. My grandfather's birthplace was Nagy Szelmenc, which is Veľké Slemence in today's Slovakia. Big and Little have experienced a complicated national history, together before 1945 and separate since. Between the two World Wars what is now known as Transcarpathia was a part of, an eastern extension of Czechoslovakia. With Hitler's blessing in November 1938 Hungary annexed about 15% each of today's Slovakia and today's Transcarpathia (see for example Paul Lendvai's The Hungarians). All of the annexed territory, which included both Szelmenc's, had been part of Czechoslovakia since 1919. In March 1939 Hungary annexed the other 85% of today's Transcarpathia, despite the fact that the population of that 85% area had always been predominately non-Hungarian. After World War II Hungary's border was reset to where it had been established after World War I. The Soviet Union annexed Transcarpathia, creating a new eastern border for Czechoslovakia. The new border started out from Hungary extending north-northeast. Most towns fell easily east or west of the straight line, but at Szelmenc there was a problem. A slight dogleg was inserted into the straight line to put all of Little Szelmenc in the Soviet Union and all of Big Szelmenc in Czechoslovakia. Almost 20 years ago a border crossing for pedestrians only was established between the two Szelmenc's. I could not cross there with just my USA passport. I knew that, but had thought that I would be able to see across the border. Unfortunately buildings and other structures have grown to block the view. I was told that without crossing papers I could not pass the limits of Little Szelmenc, marked by the sign in the first photo below. The entire roof of the building on my right was in even worse shape than the corner. The building behind it, with the blue wall, was signed near the top, in English, Shopping Center. In the background of the second image you can see Ukraine, and then Slovak Republic (Slovakia). Someday I'll visit Slovakia, entering with my USA passport, and then find someone to escort me to the border on the other side.

So back to there being a difference between ethnicity and ancestry composition. The genealogical DNA test companies all provide percentage "ethnicity" estimates. For example, my autosomal DNA yields estimates of roughly 47% Irish and 45% Eastern Europe, with leftover percentages for Scotland, the Baltics and about 5% Mediterranean (the specific areas bounce around from the Adriatic to Spain to The Levant). Some companies properly avoid the term ethnicity. For example 23andMe substitutes a bland but more suitable "ancestry composition." Usually when a DNA match is selected you can also see the match's "ethnicity" estimate, the reasoning being that the common ancestor must be in one of the overlapping "components." For my matches where the overlapping component is Eastern Europe, those who specify known ancestors from there are more likely to specify Ukraine, Poland or Slovakia as their ancestral location rather than Hungary. For my grandfather I specify Hungary because, I say, "That is what it was when he left there." It's no more than ethnicity. My YDNA tells an interesting story about ancestry composition. But, aside from a link to this project page, I'll save discussing YDNA for a future post.

Carpathian Topography

Ever since days as a Boy Scout I've collected topographic maps. Each new place has meant getting oriented to the lay of the land. These days satisfying that topographic itch is less about paper maps and more about digital data. I rely on elevation data downloaded several years ago from the GLOBE project.^*

As I've gotten into genealogy it's also been interesting to examine the lay of the land for places where my ancestors migrated from. The places they left in Europe are mostly flat, agricultural lands. I already knew that was the case for the immediate vicinity of the hometowns of my Hungarian grandparents. Nevertheless on good days from their small towns my grandparents would have been seeing the Carpathian Mountains on the northeast horizon.

Checking online for information about the Carpathians, I found this site, which includes a large scale topographic map presenting the Carpathians extending in an arc from northwestern Slovakia to southern Romania. I also found this site, with a topographic map restricted to the Ukrainian Carpathians. On both of those maps the contour and/or shading interval does not do justice to small features. (Additionally an annoying aspect of the Ukrainian Carpathians site is that names on the map are in Russian instead of Ukrainian.) The alternative map below similarly covers the Ukrainian Carpathians, also extending into parts of bordering countries.

Those bordering countries are: Hungary in the southwest corner; Romania east of Hungary and south of Ukraine; in the northwest corner Poland; and Slovakia between Poland and Hungary. The western letter C marks the location of my grandmother's hometown, Chop (Hungarian Csap), on the Ukraine-Hungary border. My grandfather's hometown is a short distance to the northwest, on the Slovakia-Ukraine border. I've also marked in that western part of Ukraine's Transcarpathia the locations of the cities Uzhhorod and Mukachevo.

In later multiple posts I'll return to western Transcarpathia. But in this post I'll focus on a portion of the group tour conducted by Cobblestone Freeway. Stops included Chernivtsi (the letter C on the eastern edge of the map above), the village of Tulova (T), Kosiv (K) and the mountain areas near it, and Lviv (L, on the northern edge of the map above). I-F is Ivano-Frankivsk, capital of its province. Below is a view zoomed in on the mountains near Kosiv.

Besides being the site of Ukraine's highest point, additional top-10 peaks are located in the Chornohora Range, which as the maps show forms part of the border between the provinces of Ivano-Frankivsk and Transcarpathia. The highest peaks slightly exceed 2000 m. But the GLOBE data are averaged over approximately 1 km², so the highest pixels (the darkest reds) displayed here are just over 1900 m. It's my understanding that the traditional Hutsul region extends west to that range, and wraps around it into extreme eastern Transcarpathia. But the tourist attractions, and the attention of the Cobblestone tour, are in the area closer to Kosiv, where the mountain ridges rise to just a bit above 1000 m (comparable to the Allegheny Mountains of central Pennsylvania). On the map above the letter S marks the location of the tour hotel. Each day's excursion began by heading northeast, descending along the valley until clearing the last big ridge. Then a left turn to the northwest, on a relatively straight and level road to Kosiv. Later excursions continued upstream from Kosiv to the pass at Bukovets (letter B), and from there down into the valley of the "Black" branch of the Cheremosh River, ultimately crossing that branch and then a short distance back uphill to the Museum of Hutsul Magic (HM on the map). It was only after returned from the trip and then independently researching the river that I appreciated that that branch, and other branches not visited, all drain into the valley overlooked by the tour hotel (S). Below is a view from the tour hotel looking northeast down the valley. The view is lit by the mid-October sun close to setting. The ridge on the left is the one needing to be cleared before making a left turn to Kosiv.

^* For a discussion about the free software used to create the maps shown here, see this recent post in my other blog. Here's a python detail for reading a tile, which is GLOBE's terminology for one of its data files:
import numpy as np
fptopo = np.memmap('g10g', dtype='int16', mode='r', shape=(6000,10800))