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.
