We happily share news we received from Zoltán Szatucsek (Director of the National Archives of Hungary) and Ildikó Szerényi (our Country Manager for Hungary).
The National Archives of Hungary have great news for those tracing Hungarian roots: the digitized image collection of the civil registers from Pest-Pilis-Solt-Kiskun County is now available on AdatbazisokOnline. The collection includes images and metadata from over 200 settlements, both large and small. This is the largest and richest county-level collection in Hungary, covering the entire agglomeration of Budapest. These records – birth, marriage and death registers – were created as duplicates under the 1894 law introducing civil registration in Hungary more than 130 years ago. The obligation to create duplicates lasted for over 80 years, ending on 31 December 1980, with the final collection closing on 1 January 1981.
Just like church records before them, a full set of copies were preserved in county archives and are now being made accessible in digital form. As part of the Petőfi Cultural Programme, the National Archives of Hungary digitized over 3100 volumes between April and December 2024. That’s nearly one million images, covering 174 linear meters of archival material – which has never been published before. Anyone can search the database by settlement name, date and civil register type.
The state registers were in Hungarian, and until 1906, they were in the form of minutes, with one entry per page. This was later replaced by a tabular format, containing 3-4 entries per page. The primary purpose of the state registers was to record the population, making their data distinct from that of the church registers.
The protection of personal data is a crucial issue in Hungary as well. Let’s examine what Hungarian legislation permits. Death records can be searched by anyone after 30 years of their creation, birth records after 110 years and marriage records after 86 years. The legislator decided that the year of creation of each volume should be the date of closure of the register. This means that the death registers held by the county archives can be freely searched, while the marriage and birth registers will be gradually opened to the public in accordance with the provisions of the legislation mentioned before. Around 70% of the digitized civil register collection is already publicly available under current data protection laws.
And there is more to come - the digitization is continuing with records from Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County and thanks to a collaboration, NAH will soon upload digitized county series previously created by FamilySearch. Full-text search is also on the horizon, as the archives work on automatic indexing.
Start discovering your Hungarian ancestors today: Állami anyakönyvek - AdatbázisokOnline