Well, I finally decided to dedicate some time to really researching the Kevish/Posa line. I have been staring at that brick wall long enough. After figuring out where the church records probably were (thanks for the help with that, cousin Tammy!) I spent some time poking around the LDS website to find the film numbers, so I could see if they were available at the local FHC here in Mesa, or order them to be sent there. I was prepared to spend a few Saturdays scrolling through microfilms. Was I surprised when I found they had finally digitized the images and put them online!

I also looked into the area’s history as much as I could; there is not much out there in English. The village of Radnot (I’m not putting the accent marks in here) became Nemesradnot at some point in time, it’s all so vague. Then the town was taken from Hungary and given to Slovakia, and the town name changed to Radnovce. Throughout history, it seems that there have always been about 600 residents. That is good for doing research, because I don’t have so many records to look through. But the bad part is, it seems like half the town has the last name Posa. When there are ten people with the name Janos Posa, it’s kinda hard to figure out which is the one Janos Posa that I’m interested in.

The other problem I got hung up on for awhile is the fact that only the baptisms are indexed. The website says that marriages and deaths are indexed also, but they are not! It took me awhile to figure out why I couldn’t get any search results of anything but baptisms, even when I restricted the search to marriage records only. I thought I just couldn’t figure out how their search worked, but that was not exactly the problem!

So, for deaths and marriages I have to page through the images looking for names of interest. Fortunately, there are fewer than 300 pages so it won’t take years. But of course, first I needed to translate the headings on the pages so I could tell what was a baptism record, what was a marriage, etc. I’m learning more about the Hungarian language than I really wanted to, and it is definitely not easy because their grammar rules are quite different. The record will say something like “Janos Posa, Gaspar Posa son” which means you have to take care that you understand who is the son in that sentence. Add to that the fact that the handwriting is terrible on some pages, and they have the weirdest spelling so that makes it harder to figure out words (can’t quite make it out, it looks like “ozvegy” and look that up, what do you know that is right after all–widow). Fortunately, from looking at so many old records over the years I’m familiar with old ways of writing letters (like the s that looks like an f), but some of the words are so archaic they are not in the dictionary, athough I can usually figure them out from context.

And I don’t know exactly how they group their records, because these records are in the Evangelical group, not the Reformed Christian group, or the Evangelical Reformed group. But most of the entries have Reformed on them. Another point of confusion.

When paging through the entries, I’m usually looking for one name at a time, and not paying all that much attention to what’s on the rest of the page, especially since it’s in a foreign language. But sometimes you can’t help but notice some unusual entries that catch your eye, like the smallpox epidemic that killed about 25 children from December 1835 through February 1836, pretty sad. You can tell that something devastating happened when the cause of death was the same for everyone on that page, and they were all children, even before looking up the word for the cause of death. Life was certainly more perilous back then!

I will only be able to get back to around the early 1800’s though, because at that point in time it looks like there are no women in town. Seriously, before that time the baptism records only have the father’s name. And the marriage records only have the father’s name. Julianna, daughter of Janos (John). No mother. Dang. So there is no way to follow the lines any farther back than that, without knowing both parent names. Perhaps if there is only one person in the town with that name, it would be possible to go back a bit more, but the names in our tree are too common. And anyway, it’s kind of pointless without the wife/mother names.

Oh well. I will post all the information when I get done as much as I can.