^{The News}
Dedicated to Austrian-Hungarian Burgenland Family History

Overall, the Constitution is well thought out, though excessively controlling of small issues; I'm not convinced that modern folk would accept this level of nit-picking in the by-laws of a current organization. Still, it is fun to see what was acceptable then.

One thing I noted was the lack of comment on the use of the Croatian or Hungarian languages, as those were the languages of the two major minority groups in the then-new Burgenland. In regard to languages, the Constitution states only that:

"The meetings shall be conducted in the German language. In case one of the members desires information or to make a motion in the English language, that language may be employed, but only when necessary."

I do not know if this was because the founders were unaware of the ethnic make-up of Burgenland in 1922 or if it was because there was an expectation that language itself would drive such non-German Burgenländers to join other groups where their primary language was spoken.

You can see the .pdf document here: Constitution.pdf



Eisenstadt Catholic Diocese Has Chosen A New Vicar General: The Eisenstadt Diocese recently announced that Michael Wüger will be its new Vicar General, starting October 1. As such, Wüger will head the administration of the Catholic Church in Burgenland and will be Provost of the Eisenstadt Cathedral Chapter.

Wüger, from Illmitz, is 51 years old and the current parish priest of Neusiedl and Weiden am See. He is a popular pastor and, as a long-term member of the diocesan guide, had already held various diocese-wide roles in the past, including that of the Deputy Vicar General. He succeeds the late Martin Korpitsch.



Replacing Old Heating Systems: Burgenland is continuing its campaign to move toward environmentally-friendly heating systems by announcing a contest to find (and replace) the "oldest boiler in the country." This is part of the state-wide goal to become climate neutral by 2030.

The Heizkesselmania 21 contest (Boiler Mania 21) offers prizes worth 9,000 euros toward replacement of old heating systems with modern, environmentally friendly ones. The old system must be functional and supplying a maximum of two residential units, while the new heating system must comply with the Burgenland Eco-Energy Fund funding guidelines called "Get out of fossil."



Decision in Güssing: The people of the Güssing district went to the polls on Sunday, June 27, to decide between two cultural improvement options: 1) Should the castle in Güssing be expanded into an event center, or 2) should the existing cultural center (Kulturzentrum Güssing) be renovated?

About 23,000 citizens were eligible to vote on how a state investment should be spent. Governor Hans Peter Doskozil said that the country could finance only one of the two options but "regardless of which variant is ultimately implemented, the city and district will definitely benefit."

The €55-million castle variant includes a new event hall with 500 seats, an open-air stage in the courtyard, renovation of the restaurant and terrace, and the construction of two new lifts.

The €20-million cultural center variant includes a comprehensive structural renovation of the building constructed in the 1970s, modernization and refurbishment of the 500-seat large hall, roofing over of the inner courtyard with an art "box" above, and modernization of the restaurant and creation of a restaurant terrace.

Polling stations closed at 2 pm on Sunday but already by 2:57 pm ORF was reporting final results (no waiting 10 days for by-mail ballots!): 59% for the cultural center variant and 41% for the castle variant. Although this result was based on a voter turn-out of less than 26% of eligible voters in the district (52% in the town of Güssing), it will be binding on the state government.



Corona Virus in Burgenland: The most significant Covid-related news this month is that Austria has lifted entry restrictions for travelers arriving from the United States, effective Thursday, June 24, 2021.

However, proof of vaccination, proof of recovery from COVID-19 or a negative Covid-19 test result must be presented upon entry into Austria. Such certificates and test results must be issued in English or German by a medical professional or public authority.

For those of us from the US, the “CDC COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card” is the necessary vaccination certificate and must show inoculation with the BioNtech/Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson&Johnson/Janssen, AstraZeneca, Sinopharm, or Sinovac COVID-19 vaccines. It becomes valid 22 days after the first inoculation and ceases to be valid 3 months after the first inoculation if partially vaccinated (received 1 of 2 prescribed doses) or 9 months after the first/only inoculation if fully vaccinated (received all prescribed doses).

If you are claiming recovery from COVID-19, it must have occurred in the 6 months prior to entry and be shown on a document issued by a medical professional or public authority. Alternatively, you can show a recent positive test for COVID-19 antibodies (not older than 3 months).

A negative COVID-19 test result must be from a PCR/NAAT or rapid antigen test for SARS-CoV-2, with the sample taken no earlier than 72 hours (PCR test) or 48 hours (antigen test) prior to entering Austria.

Despite the detail in the official statement (found here: www.austria.org/current-travel-information), it remains unclear to me what you must do if, for example, your flight lands in Great Britain or you change flights there. I say this because there are special entry requirements for travelers who have been to India, Brazil, South Africa or the United Kingdom within the 10 days prior to arrival in Austria. If you do pass through any of those areas on your way to Austria, I suggest you review the complete official statement and/or consult experts on the exact requirements.

There are also special (reduced) requirements for children and non-tourist travel. Again, I suggest you review the complete official statement and/or consult experts on those exact requirements.



The Facebook Bunch (from Vanessa Sandhu):

Greetings Burgenland Bunch!

I hope that you are all doing well! Here is your monthly Facebook update! We now have 1669 members, an increase of 21 since last month. Please consider joining if you haven’t done so! We would love to have you! facebook.com/groups/TheBurgenlandBunchOFFICIAL/

BB staff member Patrick Kovacs provided us with his transcription of Catholic marriages from 1828-1895 in Großpetersdorf. The transcription includes the villages of Jabing, 1828-1851, Kleinpetersdorf, 1859-1895, and Miedlingsdorf, 1828-1895.

Member Brien Vokits shared an album containing 66 photos grave markers from Schachendorf.  He also provided great photos of the village war memorial. He also shared an album containing 39 grave markers from Schandorf. 

Member Janet Kroboth-Weber shared some beautiful music from Dorfmuseum-Musi entitled “Es gibt ja nur Ein Burgenland so schön.” youtube.com/watch?v=T4_lVaPvY6M. Janet also shared a film called “Ein Sommer Im Burgenland Herzkino 2015”, which features the gorgeous scenery and culture found in Burgenland. It helps to relieve some of the homesickness for those of us wishing we could travel there now youtube.com/watch?v=AzlJHEKs5do. 

Member BD Smith is looking for a copy of “The Cooking of Burgenland and the Other Austrian Provinces” by Alois Schmidl, et al. If anyone knows where this book can be purchased, or has a copy to sell, please let me know and I will pass the information on to BD.

Connections: Member Bec Overpeck writes: “I have done quit a bit on my family tree and I know this is a longshot, but I was wondering if anyone knows or has any information on the Loikitsch/Lojkich (also spelled Loikits and Loikts) or the Windisch/Vindis that left the Burgenland area and settled in Uljanik or Gaj, Croatia? I am trying to gain any additional information on the families or reconnect with any remaining family members we have in Austria or Croatia. I know that all of my maternal grandmother’s family comes from Austria/Hungary. My great grandfather father’s family is Windisch/Draskovits from Liebing. My great grandmother’s family is Michna/Bajza from Bakonycsernye, Fejer, Hungary. My grandparents met in Croatia (both families had migrated there in the late 1890’s), but they did not marry at that time. Myself and several other members of both the Windisch and Loikitsch families, would be interested in any information anyone might have on either families or members of either family still in Austria or Croatia.”

If anyone has any information that they’d like to share with Bec, please email me at HooftyRN@msn.com and I’d be happy to pass it on!

We close our update with some photos from the Coplay Sängerbund’s 104th Stiftungsfest. Music was provided by the Emil Schanta Band and Bob Strauch. A special thanks to The Coplay Sängerbund, their president Kevin Fritz, their Heritage Committee chairman Frank Luizer, and our own Bob Strauch for always working to keep our Burgenland heritage alive and well! 

Until next time, stay safe, happy, and healthy!

Vanessa



Update for book "The Burgenländer Emigration to America": Here is this month's update on purchases of the English issue of the 3rd edition of Dr. Walter Dujmovits' book "Die Amerika-Wanderung Der Burgenländer."

Current total sales are 1608 copies, as interested people purchased 9 more books during this past month.

As always, the book remains available for online purchase at a list price of $7.41 (which is the production charge for the book, as we purposely choose not to make a profit so we can avoid dealing with the income tax consequences and so you can obtain the book at as low a cost as possible!), plus tax & shipping. See the BB homepage for a link to the information / ordering page and for information about current discounts (there is at least one discount on price or shipping available most of the time... if not, wait a few days and there will be one!).

Getting the book and reading it is an excellent way to pass the time during the coronavirus-imposed "house arrest."



Burgenland Recipes: This recipe comes from Heidi Frank. Both of her grandmothers were cooks in wealthy households for a time and one of her aunts was an excellent cook well-known in her village for her sausages & preßwurst. Fortunately for us, she was able to cook with them and wrote down the steps to making some of their specialties.

Liptauer
(from Heidi Frank)

Ingredients:
1 lb (2 cups) Farmer's cheese
6 Tbsp unsalted butter, softened
1 Tbsp sweet Hungarian paprika
black pepper, freshly ground
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp dry mustard
1 Tbsp capers, finely chopped
2 Tbsp cornichon, finely chopped
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup sour cream
3 Tbsp chives, finely chopped

Preparation:
- With the back of a spoon, break apart the Farmer's cheese.
- Mix in remaining ingredients and blend until smooth. This can be done by hand or with a mixer.
- Spoon into a serving dish, cover, and chill for at least 2 hours.
- Serve with rye bread, crackers, or crudités.

Notes:
If you are unable to find Farmer's cheese, dry curd cottage cheese or regular cottage cheese can be substituted. Cream the cottage cheese to break the curds.

This can also be made with Sheep's cheese, but none of my relatives ever use anything other than topfen, which is most similar in taste to Farmer's cheese.

This recipe can vary greatly depending on the cook. It can be made with chopped caraway seeds, hot Hungarian paprika, spicy mustard, finely chopped onions, crème fraîche, anchovy paste, or without butter.

A follow-up suggestion from BB member Tim Hermesdorf:
Since "dry curd cottage cheese" may be hard to come by, here is an easy way to make it. Take regular small curd cottage cheese and put it in a colander. Using cool water rinse all the whey off. That is it.



Note: We have updated the recipes sortable list with links directly to the recipes or food-related articles published in our past newsletters. You can access the list by clicking our recipe box (to the right). Thanks to the contributions of our members over the years, we have quite a collection of Burgenland recipes, some with several variations.

However, we have now used up most of our unpublished recipes... thus this recipe section will become dormant when we run out. So, if you have a favorite family recipe, please consider sharing it with us. We will be happy to publish it. Our older relatives, sadly, aren't with us forever, so don't allow your favorite ethnic dish to be lost to future generations.

You can send your recipe to BB Recipes Editor, Alan Varga. Thanks!



Quotes for Thought (very loosely tied to genealogy):

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

                           — F. Scott Fitzgerald, in the novel, The Great Gatsby, 1925

"O call back yesterday, bid time return."

                           — William Shakespeare, in the play, Richard II, Act III, Sc. 2

As I write the opening words to this [2011] article, BB member Jack Tonk is in Europe with a plan to spend a few days (of a bigger trip) in Vienna at the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv (Municipal and Provincial Archives of Vienna) and the Diözesanarchiv Wien ([Catholic] Diocese Archives Vienna) to see if he can solve the riddle of his grandfather's birth. Hopefully, by the time this article is published, Jack will have returned from Europe and can report a successful result... but we will see.

His grandfather, Ferencz “Francis” Tonk, was raised and later married in Kroatisch Minihof—but there is no birth record for him there.

[2021]

But there was more information in the 2011 article about where Ferencz/Franz Tonk was born and to whom:

[2011]

As Jack reports in a recent message (see below), he also wrote in Dec 2003 (Newsletter 124) telling of a June 2002 trip to Kroatisch Minihof, wherein he learned via Grandfather Ferencz's marriage record that he was born in Vienna in 1879 to Gertrude Tonk, with no father listed! He also learned, via local lore from a lady who remembered his father Donatus, that Ferencz was "the son of the priest" in Minihof (Father Isadore Blazovich).

[2021]

So that sets the stage for what I wanted to do with this current 2021 article:

Leaving out the part about the priest, there were great similarities between Franz Tonk’s situation and that of Emilie Illichmann, the potential foundling/orphan about whom I wrote articles over the past two newsletters. Given that, I decided wanted to apply the same techniques to Franz that I had used for Emilie... and within minutes I found a birth record (see online record here: data.matricula-online.eu/.../wien/08-alservorstadtkrankenhaus/01-112/?pg=539).

This record lists the birth and baptism of a Franz to a Gertrude Tonk. It occurs at the "birthing facility" associated with the general hospital and foundling home in central Vienna. As I said last month, given this facility allowed relatively anonymous birth services for single women, it did not require much “identifying” information, so this record is largely blank. We have the names of the child and the mother and the date it occurred. The rest of the limited information is of no real help: the names of the baptizing priest and of a "surrogate" godparent (a staff member of the birthing facility). There is nothing about who the mother was nor where her place of belonging was (i.e., her Zuständigkeit village).

You may ask, how did I find this record? The answer is the same way I found Emilie's record. I used his name and the fact he was illegitimately born in Vienna and looked on the GenTeam website in the section titled "Index of Roman Catholic baptisms of Vienna between 1585 and 1918." Therein I found an entry for a Franz Tonk in Vienna district 8 that listed Gebäranstalt (German for "birthing facility") as parish. It also gave me the book and entry number.

Like I did for Emilie, I then jumped to the Matricula Online website and its section for the Vienna Catholic Archdiocese, wherein I found district 8 and its parish, Alservorstadtkrankenhaus. As the book number from GenTeam made sense for this parish, I felt confident enough to go quickly to the indicated entry and found the record.

Now you may have noted above that Jack Tonk said his grandfather was born in 1879 (in fact, more specifically he stated later in the article from 10 years ago that, "From grandfather’s marriage records we know that he was born in Wien, on April 20, 1879, to Gertrude Tonk, and the father was never identified.") ...however, the record I found had birth date 10 Dec 1877.

My immediate reaction was my standard one: when there is a conflict in dates, believe the date on the record nearer in time to the event in question so, as we had competing birth dates, I jumped on the 1877 date from the birth/baptism record and sent off an email to Jack telling him about this and the possibility that the birth date on the marriage record was wrong.

I attached the birth record and explained how I found it, as well as my theory on which record to trust, and ended by telling him he now had a conflict to deal with. I went so far as to note, "In reviewing all the exchanges I’ve had with you and the 10-year-old article, it appears we never found an actual birth record for Franz." I then ended my message by saying, "I won’t tell you what to trust here, as I consider the “conflict” to be relatively balanced... I could argue for either date! Still, maybe I lean a little toward trusting the birth record most (at least right now, I could easily change my opinion!)."

As you might expect, the major reason I leaned toward trusting this birth record more was the fact we had not previously found "an actual birth record for Franz." The problem with that "major reason" was that it was not true! Deep down in that long 10-year-old article, I wrote that staff member Klaus Gerger had found a birth record for Franz that showed the same birth date as the marriage record! But I only registered that fact the next morning when I reread that section. So, less than 11 hours after writing to Jack, I was writing again, saying:

"I see I need to take back what I said about not finding a birth record for Franz. There was, indeed, mention of such a record and I confirmed that it existed by looking it up. It is here: data.matricula-online.eu/.../wien/06-gumpendorf/01-063/?pg=160."

This record came from the Gumpendorf parish of Vienna district 6. While it lists a local address for the mother, it says nothing about who the mother was nor where her place of belonging was, so is not much more definitive than the record I found. However, its date matches the date from the marriage record, so appears to be the correct one.
 


As an aside, this, of course, makes one question whether the mother in these records is the same person. In January of this year, I had a long email exchange with Jack Tonk while we did some research on Gertrude Tonk. That research appears to indicate that Gertrude Tonk was born 12 Mar 1848 in Nebersdorf. If this date is correct and this is the same Gertrude Tonk in both Vienna birth records, she would have been ages 29 and 31 at these two births, so one cannot eliminate either record due to her age at the birth of the child. Again, assuming this is the same Gertrude Tonk and noting that both children were named Franz, it seems to follow that the first child must have died before the second one was born. Nonetheless, I could not find a death record for the first Franz in any of the parishes involved in this discussion.

So we are left with the question of whether Jack's Gertrude Tonk actually had two sons named Franz, with the earlier one dying young. Separate from this, Jack and I discovered that his Gertrude Tonk had an illegitimate daughter Joanna born 1884 in Sopron, so it seems certain that the birth of Franz Tonk in 1879 was not a one-time "accident." If so, having an earlier Franz is not a stretch of the imagination.
 


Let's now step away from Gertrude and her life choices... as the real purpose underlying this article was to apply the techniques used for Emilie Illichmann to a similar case. While we did not arrive at the correct Franz Tonk, we did find a Franz Tonk that may have been a half or full brother. That situation shows the need to have at least one more fact (a birth date in this case) in order to verify the right record was found. It also shows that the technique is a reasonable way to approach single-parent births in Vienna.

Go here for the full 10-year-old article:
the-burgenland-bunch.org/Newsletter/Newsletter211.htm#07



As a second aside, while researching Gertrude in Vienna I was reminded of something I had noted before about the images in the Matricula Online website. Many Vienna-area parishes, being quite large, include indexes to facilitate finding specific records. Sometimes those indexes are at the back of a year's records but, just as often, are housed in their own books.

Given this, I recommend that you scroll down to the end of the images for a parish to see if index pages exist there. If not there, go back to the master list of books for the parish and see if there is a separate series of index books. Regardless of where the index is housed, the presence of an index should prove extremely helpful in your search, as it will indicate the page on which a record exists (however, do note that the image number and page number often differ... you should use the image number only as an approximate guide to where the page might appear).

This then brings me to the point I wanted to make. Those index sections or books usually have "tabs" on the right side indicating where a particular part of the alphabet starts. I've included to the right an image of one such set of tabs.

I want you to look carefully at the order of the letters of the alphabet. You should see that it is not the standard alphabetic order. Rather, letters that phonetically sound similar are placed together (and the entries for those letters are mixed in the index). You should see pairs B/P, C/K, D/T, and F/V in the example. I'm sure this was done because names were given orally and the person recording the data was never sure of the exact initial letter.

While the pairings in this example were common, you should remain aware that other groupings might be chosen (or none at all). Regardless, if you assume, for example, that the T section should be after the S section and you find no T's there, you may be fooling yourself. Be sure to look at the sequence of tabs.

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