What's in a name

A research goal that I frequently see from folks starting to chase their ancestry back to Europe is “I want to know the original (or, correct) spelling of my last name.”  In many cases, there simply isn’t a cut & dried original spelling.  Spelling (whether names or any other words) used to be more fluid than today; people didn’t carry around a driver’s license with their name spelled the same way every time it was used for ID; and officials of various nationalities were in charge recording names on documents at different times. Imagine if every time you filled out a form, the spelling of your name depended on whether the current U.S. president was a Democrat or a Republican.  That’s kind of what it’s like to chase down a name in the Slovak parish and census records. I’ve seen records in Latin, Hungarian, German, something written in Cyrillic, something that looked like Slovak or Czech but isn’t quite either one, and occasionally, oh yes, Slovak!

I guess I was lucky that this whole question of the spelling of my surname had a known answer all along. I was always told by my father that the Slovak spelling of Michutka was “Mičutka,” and that the little mark over the letter c made it sound like the English ch sound.  That apparently was the way George Michutka’s family spelled the name before they left Europe, and that’s the way it is spelled today by our Slovak relatives.

(A brief aside: Slovak also has a ch letter combination, which expresses a totally different sound than the English ch. If you spell our name the English way in Slovakia, people will pronounce the name sort of like “Mee-hoot-kaa”!)

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t other spellings of our name in the Slovak parish records! Nor does it mean that George and family came to the U.S. and immediately and consistently spelled the name “Michutka.”

If we look at George’s baptismal record again, we see the name spelled “Micsutka”[1]:

"Georgius Micsutka" birth & baptismal record, Makov, Slovakia, 29 April 1891

 And if we look at another family record, this one the 1834 death record of ancestress Eva Kaličak wife of Martin Mičutka, we see both her maiden name and her married surname spelled with ts to represent the English ch / Slovak č sound, “Kalitsjak” and “Mitsutka”[2]:

Eva Kalitsjak wife of Martin Mitsutka, died 5 June [1834], age 57, resident of Makov

As near as I’ve been able to tell, the ts spelling (Mitsutka) tended to be the Latin spelling of the name; cs (Micsutka) was (and still is) the Hungarian representation of the English ch sound. But… the Hungarian spelling shows up not only when the records were kept in Hungarian, but sometimes also when the records were kept in Latin.

I don’t recall seeing any other variations in the spelling of our family name in the parish records of Makov.

BUT just to make things more interesting: about 8 or 9 miles south of Makov (as the crow flies) is the town Štiavnik. The name Mišutka[3] (modern Slovak spelling) occurs there, spelled Missutka in the old parish registers.[4]  Phonetically, the sh and ch (English spelling) sounds are very close, articulated in the same spot in the mouth.  When I found this, I wondered if š and č historically ever overlapped (that is, substitute for each other) in Slovak, and whether Mišutka and Mičutka might therefore be variants of the same name. I consulted Professor Martin Votruba of the Slovak Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. The answer was, linguistically, no, the sounds don’t overlap in Slovak. But he pointed out that an alternate explanation might be a person moving to another village and his name being recorded slightly differently (heard wrong, remembered wrong by the recorder, etc), and becoming set in that form.[5] So far, I have found no apparent links in the parish records between the Štiavnik Mišutkas and the Makov Mičutkas, so if this possibility has some historical basis, the split in the name evidently occurred before the time of any extant records. So perhaps the two names reflect one original family a few hundred years ago, or perhaps the names arose independently and the similarity is mere coincidence.

And what does Mičutka mean? This is a question that regularly pops up in our family, and is one that I myself have asked of Slovaks and experts in the Slovak language. And the answer, that all-too-frequent answer, is always “I don’t know.” The only thing that can be said about the name is that the –ka ending is an old masculine diminutive suffix or other derivational ending.[6]  My own personal semi-educated guess is that the name originally had meaning, but either the meaning has been lost, or the word underwent some change (came from another language, had a mispronunciation that became fixed, etc.) such that its original form and meaning can no longer be reliably determined. Today, to me, Mičutka and Michutka mean simply “all those people to whom I am related on my dad’s side of the family.”

Next Monday: What’s in a name, part 2

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[1] Sv. Peter a Pavol [Saints Peter and Paul] Roman Catholic Church (Makov, Slovakia), parish registers, inventory no. 610, volume II, 1836-1908, Georgius Micsutka baptism (1891, entry #43); FHL microfilm 2,003291, item 3.

[2]  Sv. Peter a Pavol [Saints Peter and Paul] Roman Catholic Church (Makov, Slovakia), parish registers, inventory no. 609, volume I, 1796-1868, Eva Kalitsjak Mitsutka death (1834, entry 5 June); FHL microfilm 2,003291, item 2.  In spite of the dates given on the cover of this volume of the register and on the microfilm title page, the death records in this volume go only to 1847, and are continued in the next volume and on the next reel of microfilm.

[3] Slovak š is equivalent in sound to English sh.

[4] I haven’t searched these records as thoroughly as the Makov records, to see if there are different Hungarian vs Latin spellings.

[5] Martin Votruba, University of Pittsburgh, to Julie Michutka, e-mail, 24 September 2008, “Spelling representations.”

[6] Martin Votruba, University of Pittsburgh, to Julie Michutka, e-mail, 27 December 2008, “Name Variations.”

For a discussion of Slovak diminutives and what they do (and do not) mean, see the right sidebar at http://www.pitt.edu/~votruba/qsonhist/slovaklastnamesdiminutives.html#endingvariations.

New England resources: Searching for Shammas

One of my great challenges in becoming more expert in New England research is learning about places, history, laws, customs… well, you know, 400 years of everything! I’m still searching for a niche, something under-researched or a time/place/topic that just really grabs me, so I can focus a little more.  But in the meantime, I try (and try) to read broadly.

And so I went hunting for two books and their authors today, and happily found more than I expected. I needed to note the exact titles of Women and the Law of Property in Early America by Marylynn Salmon, and Inheritance in America from Colonial Times to the Present by Carole Shammas, Michel Dahlin, and Marylynn Salmon.  For some reason, I also had it in the back of my mind that there was another book by Carole Shammas that had caught my attention some time back; it was time to google.

I came across Shammas’ profile at the University of Southern California (http://college.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1003699&CFID=13189362&CFTOKEN=36713233) with a link to her curriculum vitae; I clicked on it, and found my hoped-for list of her publications, including a very long list of articles which she has authored.

Sometimes the internet makes me feel like the proverbial kid in a candy store.  I skimmed and happily noted several interesting articles. “The Space Problem in Early United States Cities” (William and Mary Quarterly 3^rd ser. V. 57 no. 3 [July 2000], 505-542) caught my eye; I’ve long been interested in how people use space, as individuals, as families, and as communities. Here comes the candy store part: I didn’t have to move an inch to get this article. Being a resident of Massachusetts gives me access to the electronic resources of the wonderful Boston Public Library at http://bpl.org/.  I clicked on the tab for “electronic resources,” clicked “J” under “Search databases alphabetically by title,” clicked “JSTOR,” and then did an advanced search with the author’s name and a few words from the title.  Up came a pdf of the whole article, which I sent to print. Voila, subway reading for the next few trips! Procrastination material for those evenings when I should be studying German! And (undoubtedly) new insight into lives of the past.

And all with a few taps of my fingers on a keyboard.

I’ve used the amazing collection of journals at JSTOR a number of times; it has greatly aided my efforts to expand my knowledge and resources, and of course not just for New England.  I applaud the many libraries in the U.S. that make this collection available. Now if I could just find more time to read the many enticing articles I find there!

Three books of interest

The folks at the Slovak-American International Cultural Foundation Inc. are offering three Slovak-themed books for $30 plus $10 shipping and handling.  The books are:

• Slovak Tales for Young and Old, in Slovak and English; by Pavol Dobsinsky, modern Slovak version by Peter Strelinger,  translated by Lucy Bednar, illustrated by Martin Benka.
• Images Gone with Time: Photographic Reflections of Slovak Folk Life; photographs by Igor Grossman, text (in Slovak and English) by Martin Slivka
• Night of the Barbarians: Memoirs of Communist Persecution of the Slovak Cardinal; by Jan Chryzostom Cardinal Korec, S. J. 

I own copies of the first two, and keep meaning to get the third. Rather than describing or reviewing all three books, I'll just mention one.  Images Gone with Time is a book of 124 striking black and white photos, taken 1950-1965. Each photo has a caption which includes year and place ("Harvest near Suja, Rajec Valley, 1957").  Photos are organized by theme, such as Memory, Work, and Heritage. There are some comments by the photographer at the back of the book, and at the beginning of each theme.  A beautiful collection of photos!

All three books are worth owning or reading, for anyone interested in Slovakia.

See http://www.mynewsletterbuilder.com/email/newsletter/1410731575 for more details about each book as well as to access the sale price.

A small addendum

I want to make a quick clarification on something I mentioned in the previous blog, “April 1891.” While the impetus to get a gravestone for my grandfather was mine, and I made the arrangements for it, the decisions were not made without input from family.  Several relatives, including George’s last surviving child, were consulted. Some of these relatives also contributed to the cost of the gravestone.  While no one has commented to me about it, I do apologize if I seemed to imply that I had acted without consideration for the opinions and wishes of George’s many other descendants.

I will take this opportunity to mention that my grandmother, George’s wife Valeria, is buried nearby (but not adjacent) to him, and she has a headstone. Other family members buried in the cemetery do not have headstones; some of their grave sites are known, but others are not and their location within the cemetery can no longer be determined.  Of course, I’ll be writing more about that in a future blog!

Michutka Monday: April 1891

Growing up, I was always aware of the important dates of my parents’ and grandparents’ lives, and those of my aunts and uncles. My family marked birthdays, anniversaries, and death dates, noting them together with the passing holidays and holy days. My mother would announce someone’s upcoming special day, a flowery card would be bought, and a trip made to the post office to buy a stamp and mail it. So I always knew that my grandpa George Michutka’s birthday was April 21. 

Except maybe it wasn’t, quite.

Genealogical research is full of surprises—exciting surprises, puzzling surprises, painful surprises, and surprising surprises. When at long last the parish records of Slovakia were microfilmed and available for research, when at long last I could reel through images of browned pages that made me feel that the village must have passed every day under a sepia-toned sky, I sought first my grandfather’s baptismal record to confirm his father’s name and set the foundation for working backwards to earlier generations. I scrolled to baptismal records, to 1891, to April and there he was with the right parents, baptized April 30 and born on the …. 29^th???[1]

"Georgius Micsutka" birth & baptismal record, Makov, Slovakia, 29 April 1891

How could we have had the date wrong? We knew the 21^st from George himself. Which date was right?

Over the years, I collected a few documents in which George explicitly stated his date of birth, rather than just his age. My puzzlement only increased. I found the following:

• On June 5, 1917, George Mitchutka [sic] filled out a draft registration card; his date of birth: April 24, 1892.[2]
• On January 2, 1923, George Michutka filled out a Declaration of Intention in Clinton County, Michigan; date of birth: April 24, 1892.[3]
• Around September 1928, George sent for a certified copy of his baptismal record; of course, it gave his date of birth as April 29, 1891, since it was information taken from the same parish register as was later microfilmed.[4]
• A second Declaration of Intention (apparently he never completed the naturalization process in the 1920s) was signed and filed on November 4, 1942; date of birth: April 29, 1891;[5] but…
• on his Petition for Naturalization (date of this documents is uncertain, perhaps February 1947) his date of birth is recorded as April 21, 1891.[6]
• George applied for a Social Security account in May of perhaps 1945 (the year is difficult to read); again, the date recorded is April 21, 1891.[7]

It’s tricky to claim a pattern with so few records, but it looks like George first claimed April 24, 1892 as his birth date, until he got the certified extract of his baptismal record.[8] After receiving that baptismal certificate, he used the date recorded there, April 29, 1891. And apparently sometime between very late 1942 and very early 1947, George switched to April 21 as his birthday on legal documents. 

Don’t even bother asking me “why?”

I suppose there are more avenues to research. At what age was a young man required to register for the military in Germany, where George was living in 1907, and in the Slovak lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where his family resided?  Could he—or his mother, or his uncle—have fudged his year of birth to avoid the army? When did George first get a driver’s license, and what date of birth (did the document even ask for that, back then?) did he use for that?  Was George’s date of birth recorded incorrectly in that baptismal register to start with, and his mother Johanna made a late-life confession: “son, you were really born on the 21^st”?

In what other documents might I find with his date of birth recorded? and really, would they ever answer the question of why this date or that date?

Standards of research in genealogy would say that the baptismal record is the most likely to be accurate: it was recorded at or very near the time of the event; the informant (parent? godparent?) likely had first-hand knowledge of the event (the birth) although the recorder (priest?) did not; it was created as an official record; and there was little, if any, reason to falsify the information. The one thing that makes me a tad nervous is that the entries on his page of the baptismal register are written with no real variation in the script, as if they had been written all at one sitting from another piece (or pieces) of paper (or worse, from memory).  Two entries earlier on the page have errors crossed out. Could there be a mistake in George’s date of birth?

How much does this really matter, whether he was born the 21^st, 24^th, or 29^th of April 1891 (or 1892)?  I’m sure it made no significant difference in my grandfather’s life.  It has made me a little nuts, because I go back and forth on which date to put for his birth in my genealogy database, and which to record under “alt. birth.”  It became a little more of an issue a few years back, when I decided that it was past time for George to have a headstone on his grave: which date to use?  Which date matters?

I decided to have the headstone date read simply “1891-1967.”  April 29 is the documented date with the most weight; April 21 is associated with memories of my grandpa. We can each mentally add (or not) the date that matters to us. The important thing, in the end, is to note his birth as we pass through April.

George Michutka gravestone, St. Paul's Cemetery, section G, lot 119C #7, Owosso, Michigan

Next Monday: What's in a name

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[1]Sv. Peter a Pavol [Saints Peter and Paul] Roman Catholic Church (Makov, Slovakia), parish registers, volume II, 1836-1908, Georgius Micsutka baptism (1891, entry #43); FHL microfilm 2,003291, item 3.

[2]“World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918,” digital images, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 19 November 2005), George Mitchutka, no. 397, Draft Board [illegible], New York, New York; citing World War I Selective Service Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918, NARA microfilm publication M1509; no specific roll cited.

[3]Clinton County, Michigan, Circuit Court, file no. 195, George Michutka, 2 January 1923, declaration of intention.  I don’t have a note of whether any of the old county naturalization papers I’m citing here are held still by the circuit court or another body.  I had obtained copies in 1999 from the Clinton and Shiawassee County Clerks’ offices; more recently, it appears that the documents or copies of them are at the Michigan State Archives (see www.michigan.gov/statearchives).

[4] Juro Mičutka baptismal certificate (30 April 1891 baptism, Makov [church of St. Peter and Paul]); issued 20 September 1928, Nitra diocese, Czechoslovakia; original privately held. I have an old photocopy of this certificate; some elements such as the official stamps are not clear enough on my copy to offer additional information.

[5] Shiawassee County, Michigan, Circuit Court, file no. 1432, George Mitchutka [sic],  4 November 1942, declaration of intention.   

[6] Clinton County, Michigan, Circuit Court, file no. 442, George Michutka, apparently 10 February 1947, petition for naturalization.

[7]George Michutka, SS no. 368-28-0040, 19 May [1945?], application for Social Security Account Number (Form SS-5), Social Security Administration, Baltimore, Maryland.

[8] Note that civil records in what is present-day Slovakia did not begin until 1895, and until that year, church registers were the official records. People born before 1895 who later needed proof of age or date of birth would request a certified copy of their baptismal record. For more information, see Bill Tarkulich’s excellent website on Slovak Genealogy Research, specifically http://www.iabsi.com/gen/public/churches.htm.

George Michutka: A Snapshot

It would be good to begin with an overview of my grandfather’s life. He had a relatively long life, simple, quiet. Everything I mention here will be elaborated upon in later posts, and with proper (I hope) source citations.

George was born Juro Mičutka in April of 1891 in Makov, present-day Slovakia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was the second child of Matuš Mičutka and his wife Johanna Fiuri-Pavlik. There are several indications that the Mičutkas were a family of drotars, or wireworkers in English. There are some indications that Johanna’s family had a shop of some sort, and maybe were financially a little bit better off than many others.

George’s father died in 1905, possibly of tuberculosis, when George was in his early teens.  Sometime in his boyhood, George was sent to live with an “uncle” in Germany; the exact relationship has not yet been identified. And it was Germany that George listed as his place of residence when he boarded a ship for America in 1907. He joined his widowed mother and a number of other Mičutka and Pavlik relatives in New York City.

George met Valeria Grečnar in New York City. Although she had lived in Makov for a number of years, they apparently had not met each other there. They married in Manhattan, at St. John Nepomucene parish, on February 2, 1913. Sometime not long after, they moved to London, Ontario, Canada, probably with George’s mother Johanna; George and Valeria’s first child John was born there in London on New Year’s Day 1914. 

In 1916 the family moved back to Manhattan, where daughter Jennie was born later that same year and daughter Josie in 1919. Sometime in 1920 the extended family moved to mid-Michigan, possibly together, possibly at slightly different times: George and Valeria and their 3 small children; Johanna and the man she would later marry, Andy Luzenia; and George’s cousin Orsula (Mičutka) Medvedik and her husband and small children. Andy was only a few years older than George, and was his best friend.

George and Valeria settled in the area where Clinton, Gratiot, and Shiawassee counties meet. Although they moved many times over the years, they always stayed in the area around Ovid, Michigan. Five more children, all sons, were born, ending with twins in 1929. For the most part the family supported themselves, barely, with farming and occasional other work—not so different from many other people in the first part of the 20^th century.

On June 3, 1947, George proudly became an American citizen.

At some point, likely in the mid-1940s, Valeria was diagnosed with colon cancer, and a doctor suggested that they move to town so that a home with electricity and running water would make life easier for her. By then, the three eldest children were out and on their own, married and with small children. The next three sons were serving in the Army during World War II. The twins were in their late teens, one in his senior year of high school and the other probably living with an older sibling. Valeria succumbed to the cancer in October 1947.

The late 1940s also brought the deaths of George’s mother Johanna and of his step-father and best friend Andy Luzenia.

George gave up the house—whose rent was probably paid by one of his sons—not long after Valeria died, and hired himself out as a live-in farm hand. I don’t know how long that lasted, or what George did until my childhood. He was hit by a car about autumn 1957, recuperated at his son Vincent’s house for a while, and then went back to Ovid. I remember my grandfather living in a sort of boarding house for older men, in Ovid, in the early- and mid-1960s. He began to have health issues, including a (mild?) stroke. The boarding house where he lived closed, and George ended up in the nursing home on the edge of town where he lived for the last couple years or so of this life.

In mid-April 1967 a call came that George had had a stroke and was not expected to live. He died a day or two later, on April 13, a couple weeks shy of his 76^th birthday. He was survived by his 8 children, 24 grandchildren (there would be 26 total: one last grandchild would be born the following year, and one grandchild had died in infancy), and 2 great-grandchildren.

This is very much a bare-bones recital of a few events and the years they occurred, but it will do for a skeleton to flesh out in later blog posts. I wish I could also write an entry here about what George was like: what made him laugh, what ticked him off, how he expressed affection and frustration, what he thought about his own life, how he and Valeria met and what attracted them to each other, which foods he loved…. But I don’t know much of those things, and I don’t know that there’s anyone alive who does—but aunts and older cousins are welcome to prove me wrong!

Next Monday's blog: April 1891

What's with the weird blog name?

Is there a contest for weird genealogy blog names? If so, I might have won it for this month.  I can hear people asking, “What’s ‘Saint Cross Upheaval’ supposed to mean??”

A brief story: several years ago, I was visiting an ancestral town in Europe, translator in tow. I was fortunate that we (“we” = my translator) were able to find the parish priest, who unlocked the small Baroque church for us and spent some time telling us a bit of the local history.  Back home a few weeks later, I realized that I had not noted the name of the church. Now, to some extent it didn’t really matter—it’s the only church in town, and in that area the churches are generally referred to by the town name, rather than by the name of the saint or event which they commemorate, such as Saint Paul’s or Immaculate Conception.  But still, I wanted to know.  So I emailed my translator, and asked if she had noticed the name of the church.  She hadn’t, but she was kind enough to call the church (far from where she herself lived), and then she emailed me her translation of the name of the church: Saint Cross Upheaval.

I was puzzled, to say the least. I didn’t feel I could ask her for clarification, because I didn’t want to embarrass her by implying that her translation skills were not up to par.  Fortunately, one of my sisters has a master’s degree in theology, so I called her and asked what this could possibly mean. “Triumph of the Holy Cross,” she immediately replied. “It’s a feast day in September, a bigger deal in Europe than here.”

Why choose this for a blog name?

First, let me say what my reasons are NOT.

• I am not making fun of my translator or her skills.
• I am not making fun of the church or its name.
• I am most definitely not equating genealogy with a religious experience, nor am I into ancestor-worship.

I’ve studied several languages. I’ve spent over 30 years hunting for and learning about people who lived in times and places very different from my own. I am constantly striving to interpret.

It is so easy to misinterpret. I have made mistakes, some hilarious, some embarrassing, in speaking and writing a language that I have not fully mastered. I have misunderstood the ways of the past because I assumed that attitudes and options were like those of my own modern American experience. I have gone around, mental dictionary in “hand,” translating what I see into “Saint Cross Upheaval,” not having the knowledge to make the leap to “Triumph of the Holy Cross,” sometimes not even knowing that my interpretation has missed the mark.

“Saint Cross Upheaval” is where I stand. My goal is accurate translation, understanding the lives of others through their language or their history, honoring their lived experience by interpreting it in a way that they would understand and agree with.  “Saint Cross Upheaval” is where I’m at; “Triumph of the Holy Cross” is my goal.