Réka Bakos and Anna Fenyvesi, both of Hungary, share an interest in family history and genealogy research and a connection to Western Pennsylvania.
Bakos wanted to find out more about her great-grandparents who left Hungary for Pittsburgh in the early 1900s. Fenyvesi, a professor at the University of Szeged in Hungary, earned her master’s and doctoral degrees at Pitt in the 1990s and is a sociolinguistics expert with an interest in the Hungarian language use of American Hungarians, bilingualism, and digital language use.
A Facebook post earlier this year about U.S-bound Hungarians linked Bakos and Fenyvesi and led to a group, joined by 250 people the first day. The stories poured in, some heartbreaking and others uplifting. The two, with input and assistance from others, decided to widen the audience and compiled the tales into a book over a four-month period.
“Hungarian Roots & American Dreams: Tracing Personal History,” which chronicles those personal stories of Hungarian immigrants and their descendants, will be launched at 4 p.m. Friday at the University of Pittsburgh’s Hungarian Nationality Room. Bakos and Fenyvesi, currently a Fullbright Research Scholar at West Virginia University, will explain the book’s origins and their deep interest in Hungarian immigration and language. Three authors, two who live here and one with Pittsburgh roots, will present their families’ immigration stories. Representatives from the Hungarian Embassy are expected to attend, too.
The volume, which will be available from Americana eBooks online or via print on demand, contains 48 stories in its English and Hungarian versions. Ten have links to Pittsburgh and the region. The stories accompanied by family photographs range from two to 12 pages, Bakos said. The co-authors believe that these microhistories of everyday people, a trend in research since the 1970s, are just as or more valuable than the histories of politically and economically powerful people.
Hungarians came to the United States in waves, according to the book’s foreword, covering two centuries: the Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence and the resulting Compromise with Austria in 1867, the early 1900s before World War I, the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, World War II, and the failed 1956 revolution against the country’s Soviet-backed Communist rule.
The Census Bureau estimates that about 42,995 people, or about 2% of the population, in the seven-county Pittsburgh metro area have Hungarian ancestry, according to a 2016 Triblive article.
Bakos’ and Fenyvesi’s research into their ancestors’ lives began with a desire to preserve family history, they told “My Hungarian Heritage” podcast host Christine Portnoy of New Jersey earlier this month. Bakos began a family tree of photos for her son so he would remember her mother and grandmother. Fenyvesi’s work intensified during the pandemic to fill up empty evenings. She found she does not have any relatives who left Hungary for the United States but helped others who did.
Bakos found her great-grandmother’s Ellis Island registration records. What she didn’t know was that her great-grandfather had a younger brother who also emigrated, and he came like many others to Pittsburgh and found work in its steel mills. Five years ago she found Joźsef and Sophie Deák living on Wakefield Avenue on the 1910 census. She located five families with the same names in her mother’s Hungarian village of Ricse, and the lineage became clearer.
And there’s more – An András and Rose Deák lived in the same house. That led her about 18 months ago to Frank Deak, who grew up in Germany and came to the United States to attend college. He would visit his grandmother, who by then lived in Hazelwood, and he bought that house after her death. Bakos and Frank Deak met for this first time this week, and he will present their intertwined story at the book launch.
In addition to filling those pandemic hours with research, Fenyvesi binge watched “Breaking Bad” at her son’s suggestion. She loved it, she said, and when she finished, the professor started reading about the actors and directors. Through that she learned Dean Norris had Hungarian ancestry from his mother. Fenyvesi traced that lineage to birth records and other information and sent them to the actor, which prompted a thank-you email and sparked an interest in visiting Hungary.
Four years later Norris, his cousin and their sons did travel to Hungary and met Fenyvesi in Budapest. She asked if they wanted to know more about their family history, and they said yes. So the professor spent two weeks of her summer vacation researching it and sent Norris 16 pages of information on his Hungarian roots. Fenyvesi wrote a summary of that for the book.
The stories submitted to the private Facebook group started by Bakos and János Szabon, who lives in Sajóvadna, Hungary, often had common themes. Many young men, single or already married, came first to earn money, for example, then returned to wed or bring wives and children back with them. Some came to make money and eventually returned to purchase land and stay in Hungary. Wars intervened and blocked travel, and when communism took over after 1956, the government seized private property and other assets.
Bakos, a human resources professional who is now a consultant, met Szabon by chance, and she learned they had similar stories of great-grandparents leaving Hungary and settling in Pittsburgh.
The best part for them is the resulting connectiveness. “You see what your ancestors went through and how they were affected by forces of history,” Fenyvesi told Portnoy on her podcast. “Basically you feel connected to a past, you start to feel connected to a place.”
That connection is needed more now, Fenyvesi believes, because of changing times. When she worked on her master’s thesis, she visited the Hungarian Reformed Church in McKeesport. In 1993, the church had a large community, and every Tuesday the women gathered to make soup noodles, a labor-intensive process. The Rev. Dániel Borsay, the pastor, invited her to join in, and she then arranged interviews. Many spoke Hungarian. She returned last week, already knowing that those people have died. Fenyvesi learned the church has dropped from 150 people regularly attending services to fewer than 15. And no one speaks Hungarian.
To continue her linguistic landscape research, as a result, Fenyvesi has visited cemeteries and analyzed bilingual gravestone inscriptions, drawing conclusions from them. Now she is interviewing Appalachian region Hungarian descendants while in residence at West Virginia University’s department of history through January. She’ll ask them about their life stories and what role heritage plays in their lives, if any.
Bakos said while it was intentional to showcase personal histories in the book, it became much more. “We realized if we stopped at the deaths of the ancestors, then we don’t have a complete story. So we also asked them how was the life of the next generations,” she said. “What happened to the kids or the grandkids? What happened with three, four or in some cases five generations? Out of this personal history collection, we have more than family history. … It’s like a living family chronicle.”
Her cousin, Frank Deak, grew up in Germany because his father took a government civilian job after serving with Gen. George Patton during World War II and married a German woman. He only met his grandmother briefly on a 1954 U.S. trip and renewed acquaintance when he attended Penn State on an ROTC scholarship. On his visits to the now widowed Rose at her Hazelwood home, he helped her around the house and learned more about his grandfather. András Deák had risen from a furnace worker at the Jones & Laughlin steel mill to a foreman overseeing 120 people. “He was a boss,” his grandmother liked to say.
Out of the blue about a year and a half ago, Frank Deak said, Bakos sent him a wedding photo from around 1910 that included his grandparents, witnesses at her great-grandparents’ wedding. They compared notes on what he knew, and Bakos found marriage records, baptismal certificates and other information he didn’t know. An example: His grandfather was one of the founders of the First Hungarian Reformed Church on Johnston Avenue in Hazelwood.
Frank Deak knows his grandfather is buried in Minersville Cemetery in Herron Hill. It had been rundown, he said, but the Pittsburgh Area Lutheran Ministries cleaned it up in a mission project. The retired GTE – now Verizon – employee came to Pittsburgh earlier this week to meet Bakos, and they planned to visit there and the houses their ancestors resided in among other sites. His daughter and possibly his sister who lives in State College will join them.
His family could not visit Hungary in his youth because it was behind the Iron Curtain. He would like to visit now, just as his daughter and her husband has already done.
Daniel Terrick of Shaler has been looking into his family’s ancestry since he retired from a career spent mostly working in sales for Fisher Scientific. János Török and Kathleen Laszlo, his father’s parents, came from Hungary and lived in West Homestead, coming over in 1900 and 1905 respectively. A number of other relatives came as well but moved to Dillonvale, Ohio, near Steubenville. He’s found one relative living in Hungary with a common ancestor that he has corresponded with and shared research.
The sad part for him is that anecdotes and family stories are lost, Terrick said. His family moved to the North Side. When his mother died in 2004, he and his brother found a treasure trove of records, photographs and documents he didn’t know that she had and they had not discussed.
“I was still working and make a living and doing what you had to do,” Terrick said. “That never crossed my mind what was going on back then. We put all that aside. After I retired, I started looking through that stuff again.”
He’s had help from a Czech Facebook group regarding his mother’s ancestry, and he belongs to the North Hills Genealogists, which has an Eastern European interest group.
“All that I have is what I have gathered through records and documents. I cannot surmise what their life was like,” Terrick said. “In my story I talk about my grandfather and grandmother, how they came to West Homestead and the struggles they had in trying to make a life here in America. We all know how immigrants suffered: learning the language, learning the customs, learning the banking industry, trying to get a job, trying to get a house. It had to be a struggle. However, I think they assimilated, and they had their own fellow Hungarians up and down the street.
“One Hungarian knew this, and another knew that. As a community within a community, they helped each other.”
He’s helped Bakos and others on the Hungarian Facebook group locate records here. Terrick said he is taking Bakos on a Carrie Furnaces tour on Saturday, and they’ll fit in a First Hungarian Church of Homestead visit sometime, too.
Former journalist and current Pitt School of Public Health senior science communications manager Michele Dula Baum not only contributed her family story but also edited the English version of the book.
She grew up in Johnstown and was close to her mother’s family but not her father’s. Baum knew her grandfather emigrated in 1910 and avoided serving in the Hungarian army and World War I. They lived in Cambria City, historically a 10-block neighborhood with many Central and Eastern European immigrants and very close to the steel mills.
She knew Dula was a Hungarian name, but no one was very talkative about the past. Baum has been working on her family genealogy for about 10 years, first concentrating on the Swedish and English ancestry on her mother’s side. The Upper St. Clair resident turned to her father’s side five years ago.
That has caused issues. “Everyone from my dad’s generation is gone now,” she said. “I waited too long. Years ago in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, there were not the internet resources there are today. I had a young child [and] didn’t have time to look in the archives.”
She stumbled across the Hungarian Facebook page this past spring, and previously a cousin she didn’t know about contacted her as she did her research. They had mutual relatives in Johnstown, some who lived on the same street as her dad’s mother.
Baum wrote about her grandfather Pál Dula coming to America aboard the Graf Waldersee, finding his name on its manifest. He went through Ellis Island. She and her family traveled in summer 2023 to New York City to see it. “I was trying to imagine what he must have felt like in the midst of that sea of people. He came from a very small town,” she recounted. “He had a sister already here in America, living in Indiana County, and she was married to another Hungarian.”
And a family story she was told explained what happened next: “He worked one day in a coal mine, and that was [enough for him.] He ended up in Johnstown and working in a steel mill.”
Just like Bakos and Fenyvesi, she found some of the book’s stories fascinating and others incredibly sad. “The people who came to America and worked in the mills and the mines for several years and made enough money to go back to Hungary and buy a big farm,” she offered as example. “Then the communist revolution came, and they nationalized everything, and these people lost everything [they owned]. It just broke my heart.”
One outcome for her is that Fenyvesi has invited her to come to Hungary and stay for a week or so. “Hopefully, I can find out more when I am on the ground,” Baum said. “Szeged is across the country from where my people come from, but having access to those resources that are there will be extremely helpful [to my search].”
Bakos and Fenyvesi said Kati Csoman, director of the Nationality Rooms and Intercultural Exchange Programs, University of Pittsburgh, worked tirelessly on the book launch and organized “a myriad of things for this very complex event.” They noted that NRIEP has a mission of sharing stories of regional ethnic communities past and present through inspirational spaces and intercultural experiences.
“She is also one of our authors, who contributed the story of her late father, Endre Csoman, a 1956 immigrant from Hungary, who became one of the most central members of the American Hungarian community in Western Pennsylvania in the late 20th and early 21st century,” Fenyvesi wrote in an email.
Bakos and Fenyvesi envision more volumes of the book, which has its own Facebook page, and they already have 30 stories on their list. They have been interviewed by the Hungarian media, and more people have reached out.
One idea is to have stories about not just people but also places, such as Hazelwood and McKeesport here and Albany, Louisiana, which was a Hungarian settlement first called Árpádhon.
As they make their plans, Terrick has some advice for anyone interested in their family ancestry: “Sit with your parents and grandparents and ask questions before it’s too late,” he said. “And don’t discount your story. Someday your grandchildren are going to ask about you.”
Copies of the book can be ordered through this link: https://thehungarianstore.com/product/hungarian-roots-american-dreams-tracing-personal-history/
Helen is a copy editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but she's currently on strike. Contact her at hfallon@unionprogress.com.