Introduction

The publishing house Arcanum, in cooperation with the Hungarian National Archives recently began a project of online publishing of various archival funds. There are many databases and many advanced options, but the search forms are only in Hungarian. In order to assist the genealogy researchers I present this unofficial guide. In this guide only the technical aspects of the search form are presented. In order to learn more about the Hungarian censuses I recommend the readers to visit the Bill Tarkulich's census pages.

Location of the database

The URL address of the database is http://www.arcanum.hu/mol/
You will see there the following screen (click on the thumbnail to see the full image, hit the return button of your browser to come back):

1715 Census search form

There are more access possibilities, but I prefer to go to the popup menu "Valasszon urlapot!" (Select the search form!)


Select the item "Az 1715. osszeírás" (The 1715 census) and the following search form will appear:

Search rules

You can search by entering one or more fields and pressing the button "keresés" in the right bottom corner of the green box. Wildcard searches are
supported using the "*" character for unlimited characters.  Use "?" for a single character. There is the option to select Boolean operators between
the search words. By default the relationship  "AND" ("és") is used. (for example, entering "zboj 1715" will search for titles which include both
"zboj" AND "1715".)  It is much better however to use the "long list" on the right side of the form, since many names and geographic locations are misspelled (due to
errors in original records and from digitalization/transcription) and you will probably not identify all possible name variations. The search is case insensitive.

Long list

Here is a search example according the taxpayer's name. Hitting the green left arrow associated the relevant field of interest will produce a new long
list will be loaded after some time (depending on the server workload and speed of your connection). This list is very helpful, but its use is very
tricky.  In the long list: "Az Adózók mezőben előforduló szavak" there are shown all the surname variations included in the database. You now to move
the cursor to any item in this list (if you do not move it there, the quick navigation will not work). You can move through the list using the navigation keys of your keyboard, but you can also do quick jumps to the desired letter by hitting the alphabetic keys.  Pressing "k" will move you to the surname "kaaln". Pressing the second key "o" you will undertake next jump to "koab". etc.



After you have selected your surname, you must double click on the selected name and this will be pasted to the surname field.



There is no way back, thus you must re-start navigation in the long list by pressing the green arrow button. A similar procedure must be used for the
remaining fields. 

The different fields can be combined using logical operators, here is the explanation of the "advanced search options"

Kifejezések kapcsolata a mezõn belül	Logical relation  between words in the same field (it is possible to enter more words in one field)
Kifejezések kapcsolata a mezõk között	Logical relation of different fields in-between

The three choices are:  "es" which means "and" ~ "vagy" which means "or" ~ "nem" means "no/not".
The search button is "keresés"

Example

Here is an example of a search result (taxpayer Kozik)



This surname occurs in 9 villages. The underlined numbers are hyperlinks to the scanned pages.

An example of a long list with the present names of settlement is here. The system has problems with the accented characters, see Lovinobaňa in the example below. In such case the expression with accented characters, must be entered manually to the search field.




Credit to Jan Ammann and Bill Tarkulich for inspiration, inputs, proofreading corrections and comments
Last update: 11 March 2005

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