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.