This compilation copyright 1998 by Peter Spiro. It may be freely used and distributed provided that no alteration is made in its contents.

The names are listed in the order they appear in the census, which is by family (household) groupings, with the "patriarch's" name first, and with the age of each person following his name. The wife is listed by her maiden name following her husband, and then their children. In many cases, it is apparent that large extended families were living together.

The census appears to go house by house, and this can in some cases convey additional information which would be lost in an alphabetically ordered listing. For example, note the fourth and fifth families on the list, that of Kun and Veis. In both cases, the wife's maiden name was Balkanyi. In all likelihood, these were two sisters, and as a result of that their two families were sharing one house.

There is a comments column in the census, and here the census-taker usually indicated who was whose spouse or child. I have generally not typed these comments, except where the relationship would not otherwise be apparent. The comments do not usually identify the relation of adults to each other. However, when two or three families with the same surname are adjacent, it is likely that they were married brothers or sisters sharing the same or neighbouring houses.

The handwriting in this census is relatively neat, but also very small, with a lot of fancy flourishes, and there are many names that I had to guess at. These are indicated by a ? In many instances, there are very odd spellings of common Jewish surnames. I doubt that the people in question really spelled their names that way. In all likelihood, it was a case of the census taker phonetically spelling the Jewish names in Hungarian according to how they sounded to him, e.g., "Veinstok" instead of "Weinstock," or "Fiser" instead of "Fischer." In most cases, I have left the spellings the way I found them, but in the case of my own ancestors I could not resist using the proper "Fischer" rather than the phonetic spelling "Fiser" which appears in the census.

The census also lists the place of birth and the occupation of each individual. About 70 percent were born in Kisvarda itself, and for these people no birth place is typed in the list. Almost all of the rest were born in the villages of Szabolcs or in nearby counties, especially Zemplen and Ung, the two neighbouring counties to the north. About 10 individuals were born outside Hungary, in Poland. This suggests that Kisvarda was a very well established community by the mid-1800s, and there was very little immigration to it from outside Hungary after 1800.

The town and county of birth are both shown in the original (except when the town is in Szabolcs County itself). I have usually typed just one or the other -- the town name if it is a major town (e.g., Ujhely or Ungvar) and otherwise just the county. The exception, as noted, is for the many small villages in Szabolcs itself. In most cases, I have not typed the occupations, because the writing in this column is particularly small and hard to read. However, an excel file transcribed from the original Hungarian by Mr. Istvan Nezo is available here, which includes the occupations.

This census was dated 1848 for the country as a whole. However, it appears to have been actually carried out two or three years earlier than that in Kisvarda Szabolcs County. For some of my ancestors appearing in this census, I have alternative information about the year of birth, and these are uniformly earlier than would be suggested by the ages in this document.

133. Ellenbogen Maria 2 [Did this family really have a practice of giving pairs of first cousins the same names, or did the census-taker mess up?]

Compiled by Peter Spiro

If you have additional information or old photographs to contribute, please send them to me at the address below.

Updated December 10, 2009

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