Genealogy

This page is a record of what I have been able to establish about my family, from surviving parish registers, Hungarian state civil registers, official gazettes and old newspapers.

On my father’s side the Uioreans of Feldioara Săcuiască run back five generations from my grandfather, to a couple married in the 1850s and to a man buried in 1813 whom I cannot attach to the rest. My grandmother’s family, the Sanislavs, turn out to be incomers from the next village, and there is a Sanislav woman in my direct line three generations before her. The Liteans and the Triteans come in on my great-grandmother’s side, and the Triteans are a direct line rather than a family that merely married in.

On my mother’s side the Conț are now documented back four generations, to a man born about 1822 in a village nobody in my family had ever mentioned. That section used to be three dates from a gravestone. It also carries the largest correction on this page: my maternal grandmother was a Chiorean, not an Antohi, and the Antohi belong one step further out than I had them.

I am writing it down for one reason: so it exists somewhere durable and searchable. I have no plans for it beyond that. It is not a project, I am not building a family tree application, and I will probably not maintain this page. If it is wrong in places, and some of it certainly is, it is wrong in public where a relative can correct it, which is better than being wrong in a folder on my laptop.

The families come first, then the twentieth century, then my mother’s side, then the archives and the method. The full lists of spellings, occupations, newspaper citations and records are at the foot of the page.

What this page covers#

Both sides, unevenly, but less unevenly than it was. My father’s side is the fuller one and always will be, because one of its parishes was transcribed and put online by a university project. My mother’s side rested for a long time on a grave cross and a handful of gazette entries. It no longer does: the National Archives have digitised the Orthodox parish register of the village my mother’s family came from, along with the Hungarian state civil registers of the same district, and between them they gave me four generations in an afternoon.

So the two halves of this page are still built from different sources, and they fail in different places. On my father’s side I have depth and a wall at about 1813, where the registers begin. On my mother’s side I have a documented line to about 1822 and then a hole in the generation nearest to me, because my grandmother’s own baptism sits on seven leaves of a register that were catalogued and never scanned.

Even within my father’s side the coverage is lopsided. His father’s line reaches the 1850s with parents named. His mother’s line, the Sanislavs, stops short of naming her parents at all.

Nothing here is more recent than fifty years#

That is deliberate, and it is the one rule I have applied throughout.

Every person named on this page was born between 1763 and 1923, and every reference to a named person stops in 1974. A few citations are later than that, and they are all about a place rather than a person: a 1983 article explaining why the railway station carries the neighbouring village’s name, and two from the 2000s still puzzling over the same thing. I have living relatives, and so does everyone else descended from these families, and none of them asked to be catalogued on a stranger’s website. Public archives happily surface names of people who are alive, or recently dead, along with their addresses, their jobs, and occasionally their court appearances. Fifty years is a blunt line but it is an easy one to hold, and it keeps this page firmly in the realm of history rather than anybody’s private life.

The rule bites in a new place now. My grandfather Alexandru Conț was one of five, and I have all five baptisms in front of me, but the four younger ones were born between 1926 and 1937 and their descendants are alive. So the maternal tree below stops with my grandparents, exactly as the paternal one does, and the four siblings are counted rather than named. The same rule keeps off a documented death date for my grandmother, several members of the Teoreanu branch whom my mother can name and follow to the present day, and a good deal of what the registers gave me about the generation born after 1923. That material stays in my notes.

Where the family is from#

My father’s side: one village, for the whole span of these records. Feldioara Săcuiască, Hungarian Székelyföldvár, today Războieni-Cetate in Alba county. In the older records it sits in Torda-Aranyos county; the birth records from 1921 onward spell the full chain as “Feldioara, Vințul de Sus, Turda Arieș, Transilvania, România”. Its official interwar administrative name was a fourth thing again, Feldioara-Războieni, which is what a 1930 government gazetteer calls it.

The Turda local paper Aranyosvidék obligingly used three of the names in one breath when it reported a large fire there on 26 July 1930: “a vármegyénkben Făldioara Războieni Székelyföldvár községben”.

My mother’s side: two counties and a move south. The Conț are recorded at Dipșa in Bistrița-Năsăud, but they are not from there. Three generations of them were born at Coșma, today Cozma in Mureș county, and the family moved north to Dipșa some time between 1873 and 1892. My grandmother was born at Lechința, ten kilometres from Dipșa. Both of them ended up a hundred kilometres south, at Aiud in Alba, in my grandfather’s own generation.

Four place names in this research collide badly, and each one has cost me a session. There are four Feldioaras: mine in Alba, one in Brașov (the Teutonic Marienburg), one in Cluj county in the Cătina commune, and one in Făgăraș. Only mine is Székelyföldvár, so any Hungarian-language source separates them for free and any Romanian one after 1920 does not. There are three Cucerdeas, set out below. There are three Lechințas, including a Lechința de Mureș near Iernut about a hundred kilometres from mine. And there are two Vermeșes, one in Lechința commune and one in the Banat.

The station has a different name from the village, and it is the neighbour’s#

Worth its own note, because it is the single most useful search fact in the whole exercise.

The railway junction at my family’s village was not called Feldioara or Székelyföldvár. It was called Székelykocsárd, in Romanian Cucerdea Secuiască, after the neighbouring commune, and it kept that name until it was renamed Războieni after 1918. Új Élet of 25 March 1983 spells it out: the junction everyone knows as Székelykocsárd is actually Székelyföldvár’s station, and the halt before it is the one that belongs to Székelykocsárd, today Lunca Mureșului. Hungarian speakers still call the junction Székelykocsárd, and Krónika and Hargita Népe were still writing puzzled articles about the mismatch in 2004 and 2010.

So the pre-1918 and post-1918 names of the same platform share no word at all, and anyone searching for this family on the railway before 1919 has to search Székelykocsárd, not Székelyföldvár. In 1918 the Romanian press was also calling it simply Cucerdea, which is a fourth label to carry. And three different Cucerdeas have to be kept apart:

How to read the diagrams#

There are two of them, one for each side of my family, and they use the same conventions. The point of drawing them this way is that the gaps and the guesses are the interesting part, so they are on the picture rather than hidden in the prose.

• Solid box, solid line. Documented in a parish register, a state civil register, an official gazette or on a gravestone. I can point at the record.
• Dotted box. A person I can name but not document, or cannot name at all. The label says which.
• Dotted line. A connection I believe but cannot prove. Every one is labelled with what it rests on: family memory, unproven, or hypothesis.
• Purple box. A named candidate, on age and place, with nothing tying them to the family.
• Dotted line with an arrow runs parent to child. Dotted line without one means the two are somehow connected but not by descent, so a suspected brother or cousin hangs off the side rather than sitting above anybody.

Neither diagram reaches me. Both stop at my grandparents, because the generation below them is alive and the fifty-year rule keeps it off this page. The two halves of my family therefore meet in a marriage I have not drawn.

The direct line, my father’s side#

flowchart TD
  U13["Thirteen Uioreans at Feldioara, 1813 to 1849<br/>link to Petru not proven<br/>Iacov (b. c. 1783) and Mihail fit on age"]:::unk

  FP["Filon Periat<br/>farmer of Veresmort<br/>dead by January 1896"]
  MSA["Maria Sanislav<br/>of Feldioara<br/>alive January 1896"]
  m0((" ")):::u
  FP --- m0
  MSA --- m0

  P["Petru Uiorean<br/>b. c. Jun 1820, d. 14 Feb 1882<br/>Plugariu, later Econom"]
  E["Eva Buta<br/>b. c. Jun 1821, d. 16 Jan 1879"]
  m1((" ")):::u
  U13 -.->|"parents unproven"| P
  P --- m1
  E --- m1

  I["Ioan Uiorean<br/>b. 4 Sep 1852, d. 6 May 1912<br/>Agronom, and a railway<br/>warehouse worker in 1906"]
  MP["Maria Periat<br/>b. c. 1856 at Veresmort<br/>d. 11 Jan 1896, aged 39"]
  m2((" ")):::u
  m1 --> I
  m0 --> MP
  I --- m2
  MP --- m2

  V["Vichentie Uiorean / Ujvári<br/>b. 8 Nov 1880<br/>Econom, and a royal<br/>postal servant in 1906"]
  VL["Victoria Litean / Liptai<br/>b. 7 Feb 1889"]
  m3((" ")):::u
  m2 --> V
  V --- m3
  VL --- m3

  G["Ioan Uiorean<br/>b. 8 Jul 1913<br/>my grandfather"]:::start
  MS["Minerva Sanislav<br/>my grandmother<br/>birth record not in any<br/>register I can reach"]:::start
  m4((" ")):::u
  m3 --> G
  G --- m4
  MS --- m4

  SP["Minerva's parents<br/>unknown. Her people came<br/>from Veresmort"]:::unk
  C1["Ioachim Sanislav<br/>b. Veresmort 26 Jul 1879<br/>widowed Dec 1916"]:::cand
  C2["Ilie Sanislav Lup<br/>m. 1916, sons 1918 and 1919"]:::cand
  SP -.->|"parents unproven"| MS
  C1 -.->|"candidate"| SP
  C2 -.->|"candidate"| SP

  NEXT(["my father's generation<br/>alive, kept off this page"]):::off
  m4 -.-> NEXT

  classDef u fill:#444,stroke:#444,color:#fff
  classDef start fill:#1f6feb,stroke:#1f6feb,color:#fff
  classDef unk fill:none,stroke:#8b949e,color:#8b949e,stroke-dasharray: 5 4
  classDef cand fill:#8957e5,stroke:#8957e5,color:#fff
  classDef off fill:none,stroke:#484f58,color:#6e7681,stroke-dasharray: 2 3

Two unproven joins on this side, one at each end. Petru’s parents are unknown, because his 1843 marriage record names none and no birth record survives for him, so the thirteen earlier Uioreans in the village sit above him unattached. Minerva’s parents are unknown for a different reason: her people came from a parish that has not been transcribed and whose books I have not seen.

The generation at the top left is new, and it is the deepest documented point on this side. It comes from a register series I did not know existed when I first wrote this page.

In plain text, with the marriages:

Filon Periat        farmer of Veresmort, dead by Jan 1896
  x Maria Sanislav  of Feldioara, alive Jan 1896
  |
  +- Maria Periat   b. c. 1856 at Veresmort   d. 11 Jan 1896, aged 39

Petru Uiorean       b. c. Jun 1820   d. 14 Feb 1882   ploughman, later Econom
  x Eva Buta        b. c. Jun 1821   d. 16 Jan 1879   m. 31 Jan 1843, Feldioara
  |
  +- Ioan Uiorean   b. 4 Sep 1852    d. 6 May 1912    Agronom
       x Maria Periat    b. c. 1856 at Veresmort
       x Ileana Boldor   m. 13 May 1896 (he was 43)
       |
       +- Vichentie Uiorean   b. 8 Nov 1880    Econom
            x Victoria Litean b. 7 Feb 1889    m. 12 Nov 1906, engaged 21 Oct 1906
            |
            +- Ioan Uiorean   b. 8 Jul 1913    my grandfather
                 x Minerva Sanislav   my grandmother

My grandfather was one of seven. His parents married when Vichentie was 26 and Victoria was 17, and their children arrive between 1907 and 1923.

Vichentie married on the same day as his sister Maria, 12 November 1906, in what must have been a double wedding. Both acts are in the state register, two pages apart.

The earliest ancestors on record#

The oldest document in all of this is a death record. On 11 November 1813 the parish buried Ion Uiorean, aged 50 years and 7 months, which puts his birth around April 1763. That is as far back as these registers reach, and he is the earliest person I can attribute to the family with any confidence. Nothing names his parents, his wife or his children, so he stands alone at the top of the page: a name, an age, and a date.

Behind him the paper stops. The Feldioara registers in this database begin in 1813, and everyone who died before that is simply outside the record.

A handful of others from that first generation, all reconstructed the same way, by subtracting an age at death from a date of death:

These ages are given to the day in the register, which is why the estimates look suspiciously precise. They are exactly as good as the clerk’s arithmetic and whatever the family told him.

The earliest ancestor I can actually prove a descent from is younger than all of them. That is Petru Uiorean, born around 7 June 1820, my three times great-grandfather. His 1843 marriage record names no parents and no birth record survives for him, so the chain from Ion in 1763 down to Petru in 1820 cannot be closed. On age, Iacov or Mihail would fit as Petru’s father. The records do not say, and I am not going to decide it for them.

One tempting record I have set aside: a Georgius Ujvári, an innkeeper (Caupo) who died in 1820 aged 60, which would mean a birth around 1760, earlier than anyone above. But his record gives no residence, and an innkeeper with a Latinised Hungarian name does not fit a village of Orthodox Romanian ploughmen. I think he belongs to someone else’s family.

There are two registers of this village, and I had only ever used one#

This is the single biggest change to my father’s side since I first wrote this page, and it is a change of source rather than of method.

Hungary took civil registration off the churches on 1 October 1895. So for the years 1895 to 1918 there are two independent records of every birth, marriage and death in the village: the Orthodox parish books, which a university project transcribed and which everything above rests on, and the Hungarian state civil registers, which nobody had transcribed and which sit digitised and name-indexed in the National Archives of Romania.

They are catalogued under the modern name of the commune, but the registrar sat at Székelykocsárd and his district covered Székelyföldvár, Székelykocsárd and Vajdaszeg. Every act I have read was drawn up by the same man, Kovács Árpád. They are in Hungarian, they use Gregorian dates where the parish used Julian, and for a marriage or a death they give parents, birthplaces and exact birth dates, which the parish books do not.

Where the two overlap they agree to the day, once the calendars are reconciled. Where they differ, the state act is usually the fuller document. Four acts out of the nine I have read changed something.

Maria Periat’s parents, which nothing else reaches#

So a whole generation goes onto the tree: Filon Periat, a farmer of Veresmort, dead by January 1896, and Maria Sanislav, living at Feldioara in 1896. No parish record, newspaper or gazette in nine archives had managed that.

And the mother’s surname is the surprise. I had the Sanislavs entering this family only with my grandmother Minerva, in the twentieth century. This act puts a Sanislav woman in my direct ancestry three generations earlier. Maria Periat was born about 1856, so that marriage was made around the 1850s, twenty years before the earliest Sanislav household the parish registers show in the village. How she relates to those households is entirely open.

The act also fixes the calendar for everything else here. The parish register dates this death 30 December 1895, keeping Julian time; the state registrar dates it 11 January 1896. Those are the same day.

My great-grandparents’ marriage, and the trade the parish did not record#

The parish register calls these men farmers. The state register, in the same years, calls them something else:

Both were true at once. The same registrar wrote Ioan down as kisbirtokos, smallholder, on the very next act two pages later, so the household held land and drew state transport wages in the same year. What it kills is a conclusion I had drawn from the newspapers, that this family came off the land and onto the railway after 1923. That is about two decades late, and the section on the railway below is rewritten because of it.

The two witnesses were Negrea János, 29, and Negrea Galahteon, 27, both smallholders of the village. Ten months later, in September 1907, the second of them appears in the official name-change column of a Budapest daily: Negrea Galaction of Székelyföldvár, with his minor children Valér and János, changed the family name to Fekete by interior-ministry licence. And negru is fekete. A man standing at my great-grandparents’ wedding translated his Romanian surname into Hungarian by formal act within the year, which is the exact mechanism the surname argument below rests on, performed next door.

The two Vichenties, separated, and a death date from 1948#

Two men called Vichentie Uiorean lived in this village at the same time, and an index that groups people by name will merge them. The state register separates them by their own parents and their own birth dates, which is the only way it can be done: mine born 8 November 1880 to Ioan and Maria Periat, the other born 12 January 1884 to a father the state clerk writes Dénes and the parish priest writes Onisim. The mother matches in both, so it is one man; the two clerks disagree about which of Petru Uiorean’s sons his father was, so the cousinship is now probable rather than certain.

The annotation is a finding in its own right. These marriage registers were kept live and annotated with later deaths for at least forty years. So a volume of 1907 to 1917 marriages can yield a death date from 1948, which is well past the 1923 ceiling on the transcribed parish books and past the hundred-year rule that keeps state death registers out of the archives. It is the first documented death date I have for anyone of that generation, and it is the only route this research has found past 1923.

Romulus Tritean, and a question closed#

I had been carrying an open question for months: whether the Romul Tritean, inspector at the CFR who gave the village church sixteen icons in 1929 was the Romulus Tritean born 2 September 1885 in the parish register, son of Gregorie Tritean and Maria Uiorean, and therefore Petru Uiorean’s grandson. The stated test was his father’s name, and this act meets it: birth date to the day, the right village, and both parents exactly as the parish gives them.

It adds the thing the argument actually turned on. He was already a railway warehouse official in 1911, at 26, fifteen years before the press picks him up as a line chief at Cluj. Once I knew the register’s own spelling of the surname, Trityán, the Hungarian press filled in the whole career between the two ends:

I now treat that as settled on the balance of the evidence. The one gap left is literal: no single document writes both Romul and Romulus of the same man. Two things follow. My great-great-grandmother’s nephew rose from a village school to inspector general of the railways and then came home to be its mayor. And the family’s presence on the railway is a generation older than the newspapers suggested.

The same 1914 federation slate carries, among the committee alternates, a retired points operator at Székelykocsárd whose surname is printed Liptat, which is an obvious misreading of Liptai, my great-grandmother’s family name in its Hungarian form. He cannot be placed in the Litean household from anything I have, so he goes down as an unplaced family-surname railwayman at the right station in the right decade.

Why the surname keeps changing#

This is the thing that makes the family hard to search for.

The name is one name in two languages, and the parish scribes wrote whichever they felt like. Across the records it appears as Uiorean, Uioreanu, Uiuorean, Uiărean, Uiuvorean, Uivărean, Ujuorean, Ujuărean, Ujuvorean, Ujuvoreanu, Ujuoren, Ujeorán, Uioran, and in Hungarian as Ujvári and Uivari. Several records give both at once: Uiorean(ujvári), Ujvári(uiorean), Vichentie Uiorean Ujvári, Ujuvoreanu&Uiărean, %Uivari% Uiărean.

The reason is geography. Uioara is the old Romanian name of Ocna Mureș, twelve kilometres away, and Hungarian Marosújvár. So Uiorean means “the man from Uioara” and Ujvári means “the man from Újvár”. They are the same toponymic surname, translated. The double entries are not a scribe hedging his bets, they are a bilingual clerk writing the name twice. A 1930 government gazetteer states the equivalence flatly in its Hungarian-to-Romanian concordance: “Maros-ujvar = Uioara”.

There is a reason beyond simple carelessness, and it is political. This village changed state more than once inside the span of these records. It was Habsburg, then part of the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary after 1867, then Romanian from 1918. Each administration had its own view of what a name officially was and which language it belonged in, and each one leaned on whoever was holding the pen. The registers sit right on that seam, so you can watch the pressure change from one page to the next.

And the state registers add a third system on top of the two. Their clerks used the Hungarianised form and a phonetic transliteration side by side, sometimes in the same year:

A sweep of that register index for Ujvári alone finds about a third of what is there, and my first sweep of it missed my own great-great-grandmother, because her surname is written Pereák. Hungarian gy also stands in for Romanian di, which is why Erodița Tritean is entered as Tritean Irogyica.

You can date the pressure from the documents themselves, and the calendar gives it away. My grandfather’s 1913 birth record is Julian, in Romanian, with the Hungarian form of the place name. The 1915 and 1916 birth records of his cousin Lucreția’s daughters are in Hungarian throughout, down to Székelyföldvár and Postaszolga, and they are Gregorian, because that is what the Hungarian civil registry used. Meanwhile the Orthodox parish a few streets away was still keeping Julian dates, and went on doing so through 1919. By 1921 the same village is recorded with the full Romanian administrative chain, and the parish has switched to Gregorian too.

So for a stretch of years, two authorities in one village were writing the same families down in different languages, under different versions of their names, on two different calendars.

The variants are not really spelling mistakes, then. They are the same people being recorded by successive states with different rules about names, plus a village priest doing his best with whichever rule was current. A surname here is less a fixed string than something that got translated every time the border moved.

The best single proof sits outside the parish register. Lucreția Uiorean was born in the village on 26 March 1894. Her own daughters’ birth records, from 1915 and 1916, are written in Hungarian and give her name as Lukrécia Ujvári and Lukrecia Ujeorán, at Székelyföldvár.

The same doubling happens on my great-grandmother’s side, where Litean doubles as Liptai. She appears as “Victoria Litean Liptan” on her marriage record and “Victoria Liptai(litean)” on her children’s. Her brother Valeriu Litean, born 1 May 1895, turns up in the Hungarian Royal Army personnel gazette of September and October 1918 as “Liptai Valér, 1895, Székelyföldvár”. An Austro-Hungarian military clerk and an Orthodox village priest, with no connection to each other, wrote down the same man under both surnames.

The suffix is not the name#

-ean and -eanu are a productive demonym suffix in Romanian. They build “the one from X” out of a place name, and the suffix is still live, which is why it sits on so many unrelated surnames. In these records alone: Uiorean, Chiorean, Teorean, Tritean, Litean, Cordean, Moldovean, Someșan, Sângeorzan, Zăgrean, Gegeșan, Hopârtean, Șpălnăcean, Selejan.

Two things follow, and I got the second one wrong for a while. Two surnames sharing the ending are not variants of one name: they are separate coinages on different stems, and they rhyme, and that is the whole of the relationship. And a name built this way can be coined independently in several places, so a surname’s distribution is a statement about where its bearers were numerous, not about one family’s territory.

Which makes one collision in these registers worth naming, because it lands exactly on my earliest ancestor. My line begins with Petru Uiorean, born about 1820 at Feldioara Săcuiască. The same parish baptised a Petru Ciorean in 1820, son of a Iacob Kiorean, and buried a Sinzieană Kiorean in 1821, and Chiorean is settled in that village through to 1921. Two men, one forename, one village, one year, two different surnames. Match on the stem, never on the ending. Chiorean also happens to be my maternal grandmother’s maiden name, which is precisely what makes this collision easy to talk oneself into.

Two similar looking surnames in the same registers are not this family: Uifelean / Uifelianu and its Hungarian pair Ujfalusi / Ujfalvi, which come from Uifalău, a different place. I have excluded them throughout.

Every spelling I found, exactly as the clerks wrote it, is listed under all the names in these records at the foot of the page.

Four men of this surname born about 1880 in one village#

Worth stating plainly, because it is the trap in these records, and it got worse rather than better as I found more sources.

Vichentie born 8 November 1880, son of Ioan Uiorean and Maria Periat, an Econom, a farmer with land, and a royal postal servant. He married Victoria Litean on 12 November 1906 aged 26, which matches his birth date exactly. My grandfather is his son.

Vicentiu born 12 January 1884, son of Onisim (or Dionisie) Uiorean and Anastasia Demian, a Ziler, a day labourer. He married Victorie Șerban on 3 February 1908 at Cucerdea, and died at Lunca Mureșului on 25 April 1948. Their children were Margaretă (1908), Ioan (1910) and Traian (1912).

And then two more, from the Austro-Hungarian casualty lists, neither of them in any parish record I have:

Neither of those is Vichentie. Vince is the Hungarian for Vichentie, and a clerk writing this family’s names in Hungarian would not render Vince as Károly or as Axenta. What they establish is that the village held at least four men of this surname born within a few years of each other, so the separation has to be done on parents and exact dates every single time. Any index that groups them by surname and approximate age will fuse them, and one of the fusions would put my great-grandfather in a Russian prison camp.

Any index will also make Traian, born 9 June 1912 in the same village, look like my grandfather’s brother. He is not. His mother is Victoria Șerban and both his parents are recorded as day labourers, where my great-grandparents are recorded as Econom and Economă.

Namesakes who are not family#

Recorded so nobody later mistakes them for relatives. An Ion Uioreanu was an investigating judge in Cluj, prominent in the early 1930s: a different man entirely, sitting as a judge while my grandfather was a schoolboy. A Lt. Maj. I. Uioreanu appears throughout the army paper Apărarea Patriei in 1957 and 1958, writing and taking photographs about engineer troops and the Military Engineering School. Given the arm, that one is a genuine trap, but it is a staff photographer on a Bucharest paper, and my grandfather was teaching in Războieni throughout. A Sándor Ujvári was a pharmacist at Marosújvár who died in 1891. A Georgius Ujvári, innkeeper, died in 1820. And an Ioan Uioran, a day labourer, died at Dej in 1860, a different county altogether.

The bigger trap is that both of my paternal grandparents’ surnames are also Transylvanian place names. Uiorean is the ordinary adjective for Ocna Mureș, so the archive is full of “publicul uiorean” and an “Ansamblul folcloric Uiorean” that have nothing to do with anyone’s family. Sanislău is a commune in Satu Mare county, and Sanislau was also a live forename in this region, because St Stanislaus has a name-day in the Catholic calendar. Most hits for either word are the place or the saint, not a person.

My grandmother’s family, the Sanislavs#

My grandmother was Minerva Uiorean, born Minerva Sanislav. Hers is still the one name on this side that I cannot trace to her parents, and the reason is where the records stop rather than anything about her. The transcribed parish books end in 1923 and no Minerva Sanislav appears in them, so she was most likely born after that. Her marriage to my grandfather falls outside the coverage too.

What the records do show is that a Sanislav family was settled in the same village across the whole period. Six households appear, and nothing in the parish registers links them to one another:

The last two are the only plausible candidates for Minerva’s parents, because they are the only ones still in a position to have children after 1923: Ioachim was widowed at the end of 1916 and would almost certainly have remarried, and Ilie married Gervița Hetea in 1916 and was still having children in 1919. I cannot get closer than that, and I would rather say so than pick one.

They were not an old village family, and the state register proves it#

The parish books record the 1902 and 1904 marriages but not where the grooms came from or who their parents were. The state acts do both.

So the Feldioara Sanislavs were Greek Catholic men from Veresmort who married Orthodox women of the village and settled there, between about 1875 and 1904, raising Orthodox children. The children are why the household reads as an old Orthodox village family at a glance: they were. Their first child is documented too, a Maria born at Feldioara on 16 December 1906, entered Orthodox after her mother although her father was Greek Catholic, on an act the registrar noted he had explained to the father in Romanian, his mother tongue, and which the father signed with three crosses.

This matters for my grandmother rather than being a detail of nomenclature. Her people were incomers, and her own birth record is as likely to be in the Veresmort books as the Feldioara ones, and as likely to be Greek Catholic as Orthodox. That widens the search rather than narrowing it, but it points at a specific second parish, and the request can now quote two named couples instead of a surname.

One of those two women turns up again independently, in the catalogue of the Turda mixed court: a 1927 damages suit against a “Sinislav Dofina l Gheorghe”, which is Dochia, wife of Gheorghe, of Veresmort. The same woman reached twenty-five years apart through a court index and a civil register, which is the kind of agreement that says both readings are right.

The Lup alias#

The Sanislavs of this village carried a second name, Lup, Romanian for wolf. Ilie’s 1909 marriage record puts it beyond doubt by spelling him Sanislav Alias Lup, and it recurs as Georgie Sanislav Lup (1885), Ilie Sanislau Lup (1916), Rubin Sanislau Lup (1918) and Iulius Sanislau Lup (1919).

This is a different habit from the Uiorean and Ujvári pair. Uiorean and Ujvári are one name translated between two languages. Lup is a byname, the sort of nickname a village used to tell apart households that shared a surname. Both are at work in the same registers, and both will defeat anyone searching naively for a name.

One caution. There is a Hungarian equivalent of Sanislav, Szaniszló, and the parish books do contain it, but I have no evidence it was ever used for this family. The only Szaniszló connected to the village is József Szaniszló, a calvinist from Kolozsvár who married Róza Mihocsa of Székely Földvár on 8 April 1912: a Hungarian marrying in, not a village Sanislav written in Hungarian. So unlike Uiorean and Ujvári, I am not claiming a translated pair here.

Both families connect to the same neighbouring village, by opposite routes#

A pattern I did not expect. Veresmort, now Unirea, about eight kilometres away, turns up on both sides of my paternal grandparents’ families, and the traffic runs in opposite directions.

On my grandfather’s side it is brides. Maria Periat, my great-great-grandmother, was born at Veresmort and married Ioan Uiorean into Feldioara. Her father Filon Periat was a Veresmort man too, and her mother a Feldioara woman, so that couple had already made the same journey a generation earlier.

On my grandmother’s side it is the men. The Sanislav grooms are the ones recorded as being of Veresmort, and their wives are local Feldioara women: Iuliana Hertia, Adolfina Demian and Sofia Antonia are all entered as of Feldiora.

So one family took its wives from the next village, and the other was the next village, moving in. Two separate lines of my father’s ancestry run into a parish that has not been transcribed and whose books I have not seen, which makes Veresmort the biggest single gap on this side of the page.

The Triteans, and a bishop born in the village#

This part of the page exists because somebody asked me a direct question: is the family connected to Lucian Triteanu, born Lazăr Triteanu on 15 August 1872, Orthodox bishop of Roman from 1923 to 1947? He was born in this village, and the answer turned out to be yes, twice over, with one step I cannot close.

First, I am descended from the Triteans. My great-grandmother’s mother, Erodița Tritean, whom I previously had with no birth date and no parents, was born 14 January 1868 at Feldioara, daughter of Toma Tritean, a Plugariu and later Agronom, and Efimie Popa. She married Gregorie Litean, and their daughter Victoria Litean married Vichentie Uiorean in 1906. So Erodița is my great-great-grandmother, and Tritean is a direct line, not a family that merely married in.

Second, her brother married a Uiorean. Gregorie Tritean, born 29 January 1860 to the same parents, married Maria Uiorean on 13 February 1883, he 23 and she 16. Maria was Petru Uiorean’s daughter and my great-great-grandfather Ioan’s sister. A brother and a sister out of Toma Tritean’s household married into the two lines that later joined in 1906. Their son is the Romulus Tritean of the marriage act above.

Both Tritean houses lost their mother in the same fortnight of 1877. Efimie Popa died on 5 May, aged 42, when Erodița was nine. Eight days later, on 13 May, Ana Vințeler died in the other Tritean house at the age of 34, leaving seven children, the fifth of them Lazăr, then four. The register contradicts itself slightly here: the seventh of those children, an Ioan, is entered as born on 1 August 1877, eleven weeks after his mother’s recorded death, so one of those two dates has to be wrong.

Identifying the bishop in the parish register#

The register has him, under the transcriber’s reading of the priest’s hand: “Ladiar Tritean”, hpdt.ro/tlooks/4428, born 15 August 1872, Julian, at Feldiora Secuiască, orthodox, son of Georgie Tritean, Agronom, and Ana Vintieleriu. Four things confirm it against the published biography, which has him as the fifth of the seven children of George Triteanu and Ana née Vințeler:

• his parents’ marriage, 3 November 1863 at Feldiora
• exactly seven children in the register between 1864 and 1877, with Ladiar the fifth
• his mother’s death on 13 May 1877, aged 34, which is the biography’s “motherless at five”
• his father’s remarriage to Maria Dragan on 12 February 1878

The eparchial weekly Renașterea independently lists him in 1923 as a Transylvanian-born hierarch “din Feldioara”, alongside Miron Cristea of Toplița and Nicolae Bălan of Blăjel. It does not say which Feldioara, and there are four, so the register is what settles it.

How close the kinship is, and where it stops#

The bridge between the two Tritean households is a wedding. The biography records that on 6 November 1911 Lazăr Triteanu officiated in the new church at Feldioara-Războieni at the marriage of “vărului său, Triteanu Romulus” to Homola Maria Victoria. That marriage is in the parish register: Romulus Tritean, 25, and Maria Victoria Homda, 17, on 6 November 1911, which is the same wedding the state register records on 19 November. And Romulus was the son of Gregorie Tritean and Maria Uiorean, born 2 September 1885. So the future bishop stood at the altar for the wedding of Petru Uiorean’s grandson, and called him cousin.

If văr is meant strictly, then Georgie and Toma were brothers, which would make the bishop a first cousin of my great-great-grandmother Erodița, my own first cousin four times removed, and my descent a descent from his uncle.

I cannot prove that step, and I am not going to assert it. Toma’s death record names no father, neither man’s marriage record has parent fields at all, and the word văr is used loosely in Romanian for kin of roughly one’s own age. The ages allow brothers: Toma was born about 1828 and Georgie about 1839. There is a Georgie Tritean born 1839 to an Ioan Tritean, but the transcriber recorded that family’s surname as Nistor%%Tritean%%, two readings at once, so it will not carry the weight. What is solid is that both households were Tritean and orthodox in one small village, that they treated each other as cousins, and that I descend from one of them.

The branch was educating its sons#

Two things say the Tritean household my great-great-grandmother came out of was doing better than day labour, and both come from Hungarian school lists. Trityán Lázár of Sz. Földvár appears in class V of the Nagyszeben state gymnasium in its 1890 yearbook, so a village Tritean of about fifteen was at a full state gymnasium in Sibiu, born around 1875. And a Trityán Lázár signed as one of the two witnesses on Romulus’s 1911 marriage act, in his own hand, so the witness is very probably that man. Romulus himself was at the Cluj civic boys' school in 1897 and 1898.

Two boys of one village branch in secondary education by 1898, one of them at Sibiu, is the readiest explanation for how it produced railway officials and, eventually, a mayor.

The parish and the school#

None of this names a Uiorean. All of it describes the institution every person above was registered in and the school my grandfather attended as a boy, and it comes out of the eparchy’s own weekly, Renașterea.

• A class I parish in the protopopiat of Turda, in the eparchy of Vad, Feleac and Cluj. In June 1924 it sat at the edge of the Ludoșul de Mureș tract; by December 1927 it belongs to Turda.
• 167 families in December 1927, one of which was Vichentie Uiorean’s. The parish held 32 iugăre of glebe and took half a ferdelă of maize and a day’s labour from each family, a third of it going to the cantor and the sexton.
• Vasile Maximinian was parish priest in 1924, so his is the hand in the registers of that decade. He was promoted to chaplain to the protopop before December 1927, which is what created an advertised vacancy; Dumitru Giurgiuca, priest of the neighbouring parish, signed for the parish council in April 1928; and George Onițiu held the parish in 1929 and 1930.
• Simeon Bogdan was head teacher, with Iuliu Răduleț and Simeon Crainic under him. On 21 June 1924 Bogdan conducted the village school choir at the station to welcome bishop Nicolae Ivan, who had come by the morning train from Cluj. My grandfather was ten years and eleven months old and a pupil of that school. He is not named, and a village choir is not a list, but it is the closest any source comes to him as a child.
• In April 1928 Dr Ilarie Ilea, a native of the village practising as an advocate in Brașov, gave the parish a bell of 70 kg worth 15,000 lei and a foundation of 100,000 lei in the names of his parents Ioan Ilea and Maria Coston.
• At Easter 1930 a CFR clerk named Amărască trained a church choir made out of the railway station’s own staff, which gave the liturgical responses. That is the world the section below describes, a decade before the newspapers pick it up.
• The village was holding șezători, cultural evenings, in its school by 1929, when the Cluj Orthodox theological academy came out for a mission day. The same institution is where an M. Sanislav turns up in 1944.

The First World War#

Transylvania was Hungary until December 1918, so every man in this family of military age in 1914 was an Austro-Hungarian conscript. Austria-Hungary published named casualty lists by the hundred, 709 of them plus supplements, and the whole run has been transcribed. That makes it the one war this research can reach at the level of a person.

Before any archive, the parish registers say something on their own. Vichentie and Victoria’s children arrive in 1907, 1909, 1911 and 1913, and then stop dead until 19 September 1919. A six-year hole in an otherwise two-yearly rhythm, opening in 1914 and closing nine months after the armistice. Across the whole family, births run two to four a year before the war and none at all in 1914 and none in 1917. And no family man dies between 1914 and 1918, so nobody was killed at the front and entered in the home parish book.

Is Axenta the same man as Vichentie? For it: the surname, the commune, the county, the birth year to the digit, and a capture in 1915 followed by repatriation at the end of 1918, which fits the gap in his children exactly. Against it: Hungarian paperwork renders Vichentie as Vince, not Axenta, and no Vince Ujvári appears in the lists at all. Axente existed as a name in the village, borne by other families, but no Uiorean carried it in any parish record. I have read the printed page and Axenta is set in bold, clean and legible. So it stays a strong circumstantial case and not an identification.

The Hungarian National Archives then produced a second man of the surname, and I had missed him for a year. Ujvári Károly, also born 1880 at this village, IR 50, 11th company, killed between 23 November and 9 December 1914. He was invisible to every search because the clerk abbreviated the village to Sz. Földvár, so no query on the full name reaches him. The lesson is worth more than the man: a sweep by place is never complete, and a sweep by surname is not optional.

The village’s whole war record is 28 loss events: twelve taken prisoner in Russia, from Nerechta and Tula to Samarkand and Primorye, two in Serbia at Niš, six dead. IR 50, the Alba Iulia regiment, carries most of them. The surnames confirm the village is the right one, because they are this family’s in-laws written in Hungarian: Bugnár is Bugnariu, Demián is Demian, Kosztoj is Costoiu, Negrea and Nyegra are the Negrea whose son magyarised into Fekete in 1907.

Veresmort, where both the Sanislav and the Periat came from, gives seven more, every one of them IR 50, including a Muresán who carries Dochia Mureșan’s surname. And one entry there is worth testing when the Veresmort books are finally read: Szaniszláv János, born Marosveresmart 1883, of a Hungarian Landwehr regiment, a prisoner of war at Astrachan in Russia, reported in September 1915. A János born at Veresmort in 1883 would sit neatly as a younger brother of the Ioachim Sanislav born there in 1879, and that is a shape rather than a finding.

Everything else on this side is a documented negative. Liptai in Torda-Aranyos: nothing. Szaniszláv in Torda-Aranyos or Alsó-Fehér: nothing. Periát: nothing, and the four Periat records in the index are Banat men. Tritean and Trityán give six records, all Torda-Aranyos, and none from this village.

The Second World War is a different kind of silence#

My grandfather was commissioned in the engineers in 1940 and the family account is that he served as a genist, was engaged in demining, and was wounded. The commission is documented below. The rest I cannot document, and the reason is structural rather than a search failure: Romania did not publish named casualty lists in the Second World War. What appeared was aggregate figures only, and a Council of Ministers communiqué giving a national total is the closest the press gets to a person. Named Romanian service records for that war sit in the military archives at Pitești, which are not online and not searchable from a desk.

The National Archives portal holds no military service records at all. Its only war series catalogued down to the individual is the invalids, orphans and war widows administration, and for Alba county that is catalogued at fond level with no dossiers, so it cannot be searched by name from here either.

Two things have to be said about the Hungarian side of this, because both were hopes and both are closed. The Soviet camp card index in Budapest holds 679,319 registration cards carrying birthplace, birth year and the father’s forename, which would have named my maternal great-grandfather from a document rather than from memory. It cannot: the database has no Romanian nationality value at all, because it is the set of people the Soviets registered as Hungarian nationals. That closes the item on provenance, not on a blank search. It does not mean nobody was a prisoner, it means that archive would not know. And the Hungarian conscription lists for 1756 to 1918 are built from the microfilms of twenty-one county archives, every one of them inside present-day Hungary, so they cover no part of Transylvania.

What the Y chromosome says, which is not what I expected#

My Y-DNA haplogroup is I-M253, that is I1, and it traces the strict male line: me, my father, Ioan born 1913, Vichentie born 1880, Ioan born 1852, Petru born about 1820, and then the records stop.

I1 is a Northern European and Germanic lineage. Romanian Y-DNA is dominated by I2a, the Balkan branch, not by I1. Where I1 turns up in this part of Europe it is generally attributed to German and Austrian settlement, running at roughly 8% among Hungarians, 11% among Czechs and 6% among Poles and Slovaks.

So a Germanic male line sits at the head of a family the parish registers show as Romanian Orthodox peasants for as far back as they reach. That is worth an explanation, and the village supplies a plausible one: Feldioara was thoroughly mixed. Its own casualty list has Szabó, Szabados, Tolnai-Kun and Malya standing beside Bugnár, Negrea and Molea, and this family’s surname existed in two languages at once. If a Saxon or Hungarian male line was absorbed here, it happened before Petru, which puts it in exactly the gap the diagram above marks: the thirteen unattached Uioreans recorded between 1813 and 1849.

I want to be careful about how much that is worth. A haplogroup is one line out of hundreds of ancestors, it says nothing about the rest of the family, and a single absorbed male line four hundred years ago would produce exactly this result. It is a fact about a chromosome, not about anybody’s nationality.

A trap worth naming before someone falls into it. Searching for genetics and Feldioara turns up a real study of mitochondrial DNA from a twelfth-century necropolis at Feldioara in Transylvania. That is the wrong Feldioara: it concerns the Brașov one, the Teutonic Knights' Marienburg, two hundred kilometres away, and it is mtDNA rather than Y.

The village before the registers#

The parish books begin in 1813. For anything earlier the only reachable material is charters, and the medieval holdings of the National Archives contain exactly three documents touching this village. No family surname appears in them and none could: they are the records of kings, princes and Saxon town magistrates, and Orthodox Romanian villagers of the Arieș valley are not the kind of people who get named.

• 9 April 1460. Mihail Szilágyi de Horogszeg, count of Bistrița and governor of Transylvania, orders the nobles of Fewldwar to compensate the Sibiu merchants they had beaten up, and to let Sibiu men and their goods pass freely to the fair at Buza. The earliest reachable mention, and a good one: the village has its own nobles and sits on the road merchants took north from Sibiu.
• 24 April 1585. A charter of Sigismund Báthory, signed in his own hand, ordering that the goods and revenues owed to the Aiud deanery be given back, because the inhabitants of the market towns of Felvinc and Uywar and the tenants on the estates of Mirăslău, Cârcedea, Hărăstaș and Feoldwar had been using them for themselves. This is the best of the three. It puts the village inside the Székely seat of Arieș, which is what the “Săcuiască” in its name records, so the qualifier is a jurisdiction and not a statement about who lived there. It administers Feldioara together with the same tight cluster of neighbouring villages that the nineteenth-century registers show the family marrying within, four hundred years earlier. And it names Uioara as a market town with a royal salt chamber and its keeper, which is the town both halves of my surname are built on. It also names Aiud, where my mother’s whole side ends up three and a half centuries later, which is a coincidence of geography and the only document in that archive holding both halves of the family’s map at once.
• 1596 and 1597. A possession order and its reply, for an estate in Alba county, catalogued to this village under the spelling Feldiod. I do not trust that gloss: the same archive glosses Gyod to Stremț, so Feldiod could as easily be upper Stremț, and I would want the scan read.

The lesson from that archive is a cataloguing one. Fewldwar, “earth fort”, is one of the commonest place names in the old kingdom, and searching the raw spelling returns sixty-odd documents of which one is mine. It is the cataloguer’s gloss in curly brackets that identifies a village, never the string. The same is true of Újvár, “new castle”.

For the village between the charters and the registers, the sources are conscriptions rather than charters, and I have their shelf marks but not their contents: the 1750 fiscal census of Transylvania has two booklets for Székelyföldvár, and the 1785-86 urbarial conscription has one for it and one for Veresmart, filed under Kolozs county and the Felvinc district, which is not where I would have looked.

What happened after the registers stop#

The parish records end in 1923 and show a family of farmers. The newspapers pick the story up two decades later and show something else: the family was on the railway.

Războieni-Cetate is a major junction on the main line, which is the reason. A 1982 village report counts fifty-two railway families living in the village and around the station.

The date is the part I had wrong, and the state register corrected it. I used to write that the family moved off the land and onto the railway after 1923. In fact Ioan Uiorean was a Hungarian State Railways warehouse worker in 1906, his son Vichentie and Vichentie’s father-in-law Gregorie Litean were both Royal Hungarian Post servants in the same year, Romulus Tritean was a MÁV storekeeper in 1911 and a station overseer at Székelykocsárd by 1914, and a Liptai was a retired points operator there by the same date. That is five men of these three surnames in railway or postal service before 1918. The interwar careers are a continuation of a trade the family already had, not a change of one.

There is one boundary on how far that can be pushed. The Hungarian official directory lists the staff of Székelykocsárd station year by year, and no Uiorean or Ujvári appears in any year from 1903 to 1918. But it lists only the commissioned and clerical grades, and never the állomásfelvigyázó, kocsimester, raktárnok, váltókezelő or munkás ranks this family actually held. Its silence is structural rather than evidence.

Inside the parish register the shift shows up once, in 1913, when Romulus Tritean had a son baptised and the priest recorded his occupation as Actariu la calea ferată, railway clerk. That is the only railway job anywhere in the transcribed parish books.

Then the press:

• A Vicențiu Uioreanu was station master (șeful stației CFR) at Războieni through the war years. He turns up in Universul on 1 March 1942 and Tribuna on 4 March 1942, both reporting the prefect’s visit to the recruits’ canteen at the station; in Tribuna again on 8 May 1942, arriving at the scene when a wagon-inspection worker was injured at the station, alongside the police chief; in Țara on 21 May 1942, listed at a national celebration; in Foaia poporului on 30 January 1944 as “Uiorean Vicențiu șef de gară”; and in both România Liberă and Scânteia on 26 April 1945, in the affair described below. Which Vichentie this is I cannot settle from the press alone. On age it is more likely my grandfather’s eldest brother, born 1907, than their father, born 1880.
• An Uiorean Valer was commended as a mechanic in Lupta Ardealului on 15 September 1948. My grandfather’s brother Valer, born 1921, would have been 27. No place is given, so this one is suggestive only.
• On the Litean side, Litean Ana was a cleaner at Războieni station, injured in the triple train collision there on 6 July 1936 and reported in Aranyosvidék, Magyar Ujság and Hirlap. Valeriu Litean was a storekeeper at the station in 1972, and a Litean Emil of Războieni-Cetate appears in a 1946 court notice. Litean Irimian and his two sons are named in an Igazság report on village land and labour in August 1952.

The 1947 dismissal list, which is the best document on this#

Monitorul Oficial of 8 July 1947 carries a decision of the Ministry of Communications, no. 17.299 of 30 June 1947, whose first article reads:

“Următorii salariați din Direcțiunea Generală C. F. R., Direcțiunea VII Regională Cluj, se licențiază din serviciu, pe ziua de 1 Iunie 1947”

It is not a staff yearbook and not a promotion list. It is a mass dismissal, backdated a month, running station by station across the Cluj regional directorate. Among the roughly thirty names at st. Războieni are four that carry a family surname:

Three separate families, all at one station, in one official document with job titles and pay grades: Uiorean from my grandfather’s line, Litean from my great-grandmother’s, and Sanislav from my grandmother’s. Litean appears twice. Uiorean Rubin is almost certainly Ruvim, born 1 June 1911, my grandfather’s brother, who was 36.

Two things follow. The railway thread stops being a set of newspaper mentions and becomes documentary. And it ends badly, on a date: all of them were out of the service on 1 June 1947. That is a genuine addition to the family history and not a happy one, and it puts a hard boundary on anyone trying to trace them through railway employment afterwards.

Sanislav Ioan is also a new name on the shortest line I have. Minerva Sanislav’s parents are unknown, and this is a Sanislav man of working age at the station her family was tied to, in a document that gives his exact grade. A CFR personnel file for him would give a birthplace, and Veresmort is what I am looking for. A Sănislav Ioan of Vereșmort appears as a plaintiff in the Turda court in 1927, which is the same name in the right place twenty years earlier, and no more than that.

The 1945 purge list#

That earlier item is worth setting out properly, because it is the one place where the family brushes against national politics. On 26 April 1945 both Scânteia and România Liberă carried the same Ministry of Communications communiqué: a list of fourteen station masters and goods clerks around the country who had loaded wagons fără aprobare, without central authorisation, of maize, salt, soda, wine, barley and oats. Item 13 is “Uioreanu V., șeful stației Războieni”, charged with 92 supplementary collective wagons plus 9 complete ones of salt and soda. All fourteen were dismissed, and the communiqué says arrest orders and referrals to the courts were issued at the same time. Scânteia adds that they should be “branded with the red-hot iron of public contempt”.

It was a communist operation, and the page says so itself. Scânteia was the Communist Party’s paper, the same page carries party recruitment notices and People’s Tribunal proceedings, and the article names the two men running the ministry as “tovarășul Ministru Gheorghiu-Dej și tovarășul Ministru Maurer”: Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a former railway worker and the future communist leader of Romania, seven weeks after the Soviet-backed Groza government took power. The railways were the party’s core industrial base, and Communications was one of the instruments it used to clear out the old apparatus.

Whether he actually did anything improper I cannot tell, and I am wary of both easy readings. The charge is oddly specific for a smear, and it is not a lone accusation: the three stations listed consecutively are Uioara (Ocna Mureș, with its salt mine and soda works), Războieni and Unirea (Veresmort), adjacent stops on the same line, all cited for salt and soda. That looks like a whole traffic corridor being swept, or a long-standing local habit of shipping the works’ output. What is clear is how elastic the offence was in 1945: Romania owed enormous reparations deliveries to the USSR under the Armistice Convention and rail capacity was the bottleneck, so moving wagons off the plan could be recast as sabotage whenever it suited. Something that had probably been ordinary practice became a crime the moment a communist minister needed the wagons and needed the station masters replaced.

The archive then goes quiet on him. That communiqué is his last appearance, and I do not know whether the arrest order was ever carried out. Two years later the same station is being cleared out wholesale in the dismissal list above.

The village was fought over in September 1944#

Between the station master’s wartime appearances and my grandfather’s posting home there is one event the notes had missed entirely. The Blaj weekly Unirea of 1945 carries a parish priest’s obituary of a 27-year-old in his final year at the Politehnica: “Traian a căzut în luptele dela Războieni-Cetate, în 11 Sept. 1944, pentru recucerirea Turzii și a Ardealului de Nord”, and he is buried in the village cemetery.

So the village was fought over during the Turda operation, and men were buried in its churchyard. A junction station on the main line in the middle of that was not a quiet posting, and it is the immediate backdrop to the April 1945 communiqué.

The Great Union’s only fatality began at this station#

Not a genealogical find, and the sharpest single fact anyone has produced about the village.

On 30 November 1918, on the eve of the national assembly at Alba Iulia, Hungarian hussars at “gara Cucerdea (Răsboeni)” tore up a tricolour flying from a window of the train carrying Romanians to the assembly. In the scuffle the station guard was disarmed. The quarrel ran on to Teiuș, where the guards there demanded the return of the weapons taken at Cucerdea and, when the train pulled out, machine-gunned it. Ion Arion of Agriș, “fecior ca un brad, abea sosit acasă din răsboiu”, was hit in the heart by a round that reached the last carriage. He was buried three days later beside the station at Agriș under a monument the commune raised, and he is the only death of the Romanian union.

Renașterea tells it in 1930 and ASTRA’s review Transilvania tells it again in 1943, adding that the shooters were hidden behind the station buildings and that the train fired on was the one from Cluj. Vichentie Uiorean was 38 and living in the village, and his sons and grandsons would spend their working lives on that platform.

My grandmother, and two more Sanislavs at the station#

My grandmother worked at that station too. Minerva Uiorean appears twice in Unirea in 1972, both times in pieces praising the restaurant at Războieni station: on 20 September as “Minerva Uioreanu, ajutor șef unitate”, assistant head of the unit, and on 31 December among the restaurant’s staff, with Iudita Damian and Elena Popa. Later items, which the fifty-year rule keeps off this page, show her running the place.

A search note that cost me this identification on the first pass: exact-phrase queries for “Minerva Uiorean” return nothing, because the papers hyphenate across line breaks and the OCR sometimes reads the surname as Viorianu. Searching the two words separately finds her.

Two more Sanislav traces from the village, for the record:

• An M. Sanislav took part in the village cultural evenings, the șezători, at Războieni in the summer of 1944, reported identically in Universul on 6 August and Tribuna on 13 August. The full item describes Leontina Nemeș, a teacher at the girls’ high school in Turda, running weekly șezători in the commune together with ASTRA and the local teaching staff. Minerva would have been in her twenties, and my grandfather was posted to the village school the following year. It is an initial, though, and I am not going to pretend it is more than that.
• A Sanislav Petru played for the CFR Războieni football team in September 1968 (Unirea, 10 September), one more Sanislav in the railway community there.

My grandfather, Ioan Uiorean#

He took the other route out of farming: he trained as a teacher, and the paper trail on him is the fullest in this whole exercise. Ioan Uiorean, born 8 July 1913.

School in Cluj, 1931 to 1937#

He was at the Școala Normală de Băieți din Cluj, the boys’ teacher-training college. He appears in its end-of-year prize lists in the Cluj daily Patria two years running:

• 4 July 1931, under “La școala normală de băieți”: “Cl. II.: Grigoriță N., Uiorean Ion, Popa Ion, David Ion, Tulbure Emil, Marițiu Ilie.”
• 12 June 1932, in the section “La școala normală de băieți”, under the director Dumitru Goga: “Cl. III. Uiorean Ion, Grigoriță Nicolae, Popa Ion.”

The same three boys move from Cl. II to Cl. III together, which is what makes this a real pupil rather than a coincidence of names. A later gazette gives his graduation as series 1937, with an average of 7.10, and that closes the loop: Cl. II in 1930/31 puts Cl. VII in 1936/37.

One detail from the 1932 article that I liked. It records that the Cluj normal school pupils regularly went out to villages to perform for ASTRA, in national costume, with choir and orchestra. That is the same ASTRA behind the wartime cultural evenings at Războieni, and it is recognisably the same work he was doing at the village culture house twenty-five years later.

Commissioned in the engineers, 1940#

By royal decree of Carol II, on the report of the Ministry of National Defence no. 16.960 of 4 June 1940, published in Monitorul Oficial, Partea I, nr. 130, of 7 June 1940:

“Înălțăm la gradul de sublocotenent de rezervă pe data de 8 Iunie 1940 … pe tinerii cu termen redus … care au absolvit … cursurile reduse, seria I-a ce au funcționat pe lângă Centrele de instrucție ale armelor respective; repartizându-se la unități:”

Under the arm heading Geniu, in the Curs redus, Seria I-a list, is the entry “Uiorean V. Ioan”. These lists give surname, then the father’s initial, then the given name, so that is Ioan, son of V[ichentie].

So he was commissioned a reserve second lieutenant in the engineers on 8 June 1940. Two things follow from the wording. Termen redus, reduced service, was the shortened conscription open to men with a diploma, which is the normal school qualification doing its work. And the decree assigns the new officers “la unități” without printing which, so I cannot name his unit.

He was commissioned three weeks before Romania lost Bessarabia and two months before it lost northern Transylvania.

Teaching, 1941 to 1974#

Ten items track him, and the first two are not in Transylvania at all.

He did not start in his own village. He qualified in 1937, was commissioned in 1940, and in October 1941 was posted to Păpușoi in Cetatea-Albă county, in the far south of Bessarabia, one of a long list of teachers sent to the province in the months after Romania retook it. That appointment obliged every man in it to request a transfer as of 1 September 1942. He earned his tenure at Păpușoi in the summer of 1943, with a mark of 8.84 against the 7.10 he left college with. Bessarabia was lost again in August 1944, and the October 1945 gazette that posts him to Războieni-Cetate is him coming home after it.

Then a gap I cannot close. In December 1947 he is transferred out of the village to Luduș-Avrămești, about thirty kilometres away, and in August 1948 he is at the school there. By April 1951 the Cluj Hungarian daily has him as a school director, and from 1953 onward every item puts him back in his own village. So he went away for something between two and four years and came back, and the posting that brought him back is not in anything I have read.

After that he stayed: school director by 1951, still running the culture house in 1959, back to classroom teaching by 1963 with someone else as head, and still being quoted on the school’s exam results in 1974, at 61.

The culture house has a family history of its own. A cămin cultural was set up in the village in December 1941 by the mayor, Romulus Triteanu, who was his mother’s first cousin. Whether the one my grandfather was running in the 1950s was that same institution or a communist refoundation with the same name, I cannot tell from the press.

One caveat I cannot remove. The 1940 military entry carries the father’s initial V., which fits. The teaching entries do not, and his cousin was also an Ioan Uiorean with a father called Vichentie. What argues for my grandfather rather than the cousin is the path itself: the cousin’s father was a day labourer, and normal school followed by a reserve officer course was not the road out of that household. There is one loose thread in it, which I record because it is the sort of detail that separates two men with one name: series 1937 would make him twenty-four at the end of normal school, where nineteen or twenty was usual. That is possible for a farming family’s son who started late. It is a strong case, not a closed one.

My mother’s side: the Conț, the Chiorean and the Antohi#

This section used to be a gravestone, a handful of gazette entries and a surname argument. It is not that any more. The Orthodox parish register of Dipșa and the Hungarian state civil registers of the Dipșa registry district are both digitised in the National Archives portal, and between them they document four generations of the Conț family and place its origin outside Dipșa altogether.

It also carries the largest single correction on this page, and it came out of the same register: my maternal grandmother was a Chiorean, not an Antohi. I had inferred her surname from three names on a grave cross, and the inference was wrong.

The line, as documented#

flowchart TD
  VC["Vasile Conț / Koncz Vaszil<br/>b. c. 1822 at Coșma<br/>d. Dipșa 20 Dec 1897, aged 75"]
  RP["Ravna Popa<br/>dead before 1897"]
  k1((" ")):::u
  VC --- k1
  RP --- k1

  NC["Nicolae Conț<br/>b. c. 1867 at Coșma<br/>d. Dipșa 7 Nov 1918, aged 51"]
  k1 --> NC

  DE["David Conț<br/>b. c. 1873 at Coșma"]
  SP["Salomia Pásc<br/>b. c. 1876 at Galații Bistriței<br/>d. Dipșa 13 Feb 1914, aged 38"]
  k2((" ")):::u
  k1 --> DE
  DE --- k2
  SP --- k2

  DA["David Conț<br/>b. 25 May 1902 at Dipșa<br/>my great-grandfather"]
  MB["Marta Bartoș<br/>of Măgurele"]
  k3((" ")):::u
  k2 --> DA
  DA --- k3
  MB --- k3

  AC["Alexandru Conț<br/>b. 1 Jul 1923, d. 1964<br/>my grandfather"]:::start
  EC["Elena Chiorean<br/>b. 1923 at Lechința<br/>my grandmother"]:::start
  k4((" ")):::u
  k3 --> AC
  AC --- k4
  EC --- k4

  AA["Ana Antohi<br/>1902 to 1962, buried at Aiud<br/>born Teoreanu, from family memory"]
  EF["Elena's father<br/>a Chiorean<br/>name unknown"]:::unk
  k5((" ")):::u
  AA --- k5
  EF --- k5
  k5 -.->|"family memory"| EC

  TM["Teoreanu Martin, plotonier<br/>b. 1895, gendarme<br/>Cluj inspectorate to 1937"]:::cand
  AA -.-|"her brother? hypothesis"| TM

  NEXT(["my mother's generation<br/>alive, kept off this page"]):::off
  k4 -.-> NEXT

  classDef u fill:#444,stroke:#444,color:#fff
  classDef start fill:#1f6feb,stroke:#1f6feb,color:#fff
  classDef unk fill:none,stroke:#8b949e,color:#8b949e,stroke-dasharray: 5 4
  classDef cand fill:#8957e5,stroke:#8957e5,color:#fff
  classDef off fill:none,stroke:#484f58,color:#6e7681,stroke-dasharray: 2 3

Compare that with what this page used to say, which was that almost every line on this side was dotted. The left-hand column is now solid all the way down. What is still dotted is the join on the right: Ana Antohi is very probably my grandmother’s mother, and the man she married is nameless.

In plain text:

Vasile Conț       b. c. 1822 at Coșma   d. Dipșa 20 Dec 1897, aged 75
  x Ravna Popa    dead before 1897
  |
  +- Nicolae Conț b. c. 1867 at Coșma   d. Dipșa 7 Nov 1918, aged 51
  |    x Marta Pop  b. c. 1871 at Oarba de Mureș
  |    +- seven children, including Nicolae b. 25 May 1894, who went to America
  |
  +- David Conț   b. c. 1873 at Coșma
       x Salomia Pásc  b. c. 1876   d. Dipșa 13 Feb 1914
       |
       +- David Conț   b. 25 May 1902 at Dipșa
            x Marta Bartoș  of Măgurele
            |
            +- Alexandru Conț   b. 1 Jul 1923   d. 1964 at Aiud
                 x Elena Chiorean   b. 1923 at Lechința

The three things that hid this family from a name search#

I had reported, more than once, that no Conț of Dipșa could be found. That was wrong three times over, and each reason is worth more than the family it hid.

1. A register index lists the registered person and never the parents. A birth act is indexed under the baby. Nicolae Conț the elder appears in five acts and is indexed in none of them, because he is always the father or the declarant. A generation above the indexed one cannot be reached by name search at all, and has to be found by opening the acts of its likely children. That is the single most useful thing this portal has taught me, and it applies to every register series in it, on both sides of my family.

2. The state registrar and the parish priest wrote the same given name in different languages. The registry district wrote Koncz Miklós. The Orthodox priest, in the same village in the same years, wrote Conțiu Neculae. No string search connects those. The identity is proved on the page twice: the 1897 death act names the declarant “Koncz Miklós (Nikolae)”, the registrar glossing it himself, and on his son’s 1902 birth act the man signed “Koncz Niculae”. He signed a 1904 act “Conți Niculae”.

3. Dipșa’s state civil registers begin only in October 1895, and so does every index built on them. Anyone born before that date is unreachable by any name search of the civil series, which is exactly why a man born in May 1894 could not be found. Check when a series begins, not only when it ends.

So the family is one family under Koncz, Konczz, Concz, Conț, Conțiu and Conți, with Miklós = Nicolae = Neculae, János = Ioan, Vaszil = Vasile and Szabina = Sabina.

The 1897 death act, which reaches a generation nothing else does#

That remark line is what makes this certain rather than probable. It gives me Vasile Conț, born about 1822 at Coșma, dead at Dipșa on 20 December 1897, and Ravna Popa, dead before him: my great-great-great-grandparents, and the deepest documented point on either side of my family.

It is the same class of evidence as the Periat death act on my father’s side, and it works for the same reason. A death act names the deceased’s parents or spouse and a birth act does not index them, so on both sides of this family the generation nobody could find came out of a burial rather than a birth.

And it says the family is not from Dipșa. Vasile, and both of his sons, were born at Coșma, today Cozma in Mureș county, about fifty kilometres to the south. Nobody in my family had ever mentioned the place. The move north to Dipșa happened after 1873 and before 1892.

Two more things the acts give about that generation. Nicolae the elder was literate, and unusually so: he signed three acts in his own hand while his brother David signed with crosses. And every act of his carries the clause that it had been explained to him in Romanian because he did not understand Hungarian. He lived at Dipșa house no. 3 in 1897, the house his father died in, and no. 99 from 1900; his brother was at no. 92.

My grandfather’s baptism#

“David Conț and Marta”, my great-grandparents, are now named and dated: David Conț born 25 May 1902 at Dipșa, and Marta Bartoș of Măgurele. Family memory had the forenames and nothing else, and it was right about both.

Telling the two Davids apart took a detail. There is a David born about 1873 at Coșma and a David born 1902 at Dipșa, father and son, and both were adults with children in the register. The 1933 and 1935 acts of the younger couple give the father’s origin as jud. Năsăud, comuna Dipșa, and the only Dipșa-born David in the family is the one baptised on 25 May 1902. He was 21 when Alexandru was born; his own father would have been 50.

Alexandru was the eldest of five, and the set is closed. I have read every baptism page from 1922 to the end of the volume. The page covering 1922 to mid-1923 holds no Conț at all, so he is the eldest, and the pages from 1938 to June 1950 carry no further child of that couple. The four younger ones were born between 1926 and 1937 and their descendants are alive, so the fifty-year rule keeps them off this page. Family memory named four siblings and the register found all four, with one genuine discrepancy in a forename that only the family can settle.

The register itself closes on 1 June 1950, on a page carrying an inspection note, because Romanian state civil registration took over. Everything after that date is with a registrar, not an archivist.

The man who went to America#

Nicolae Conț, born 25 May 1894, was the eldest son of Nicolae the elder, and therefore my great-grandfather’s first cousin. He is the best single document on this side of the family, and for a long time he was the only one.

Monitorul Oficial, Partea 1, of 14 August 1929, file no. 54 of that year, before the naturalisation commission:

D. Nicolae Conț, român de origină, supus american, de profesiune econom, domiciliat în comuna Dipșa, județul Năsăud, născut în acea comună la data de 25 Mai 1894, de religie ortodoxă, a făcut la această comisiune cerere de a i se acorda naționalitatea română, declarând că renunță la cetățenia americană și la orice altă supușenie străină.

The decision follows in the gazette of 13 February 1930, over Iuliu Maniu’s signature, and there he is a cattle dealer rather than a farmer. So: born in Dipșa on a known day, emigrated to the United States, took American citizenship, came home, and in 1929 gave it up to be Romanian again.

And the parish register corroborates the gazette on the page. His baptismal row, written in 1894, carries three later annotations in its right-hand columns.

The gazette heard his petition on 14 August 1929, and a month later the parish issued the extract, which is precisely the document the commission required to prove român de origină and birth in the commune. The register recorded the same transaction from the other side. The second extract, in November 1934 and “in a military matter”, is what a man who had just traded American citizenship for Romanian would face. And the red stamp says he died at home on 9 June 1973, aged 79. He came back for good.

His father died on 7 November 1918 while he was away, in the week Austria-Hungary collapsed, in a cluster of adult deaths at the village that reads like the influenza pandemic although the priest wrote every cause as ordinary.

Two things follow from him, and one is a whole archive. He was Orthodox, which is hard evidence on the confession question and points away from a Hungarian Reformed or Greek Catholic reading of the Conț surname itself. And a Romanian villager who held American citizenship before 1929 will be in indexed American federal records that routinely name the exact birth village and the next of kin left behind: naturalisation petitions, passenger manifests, the 1917 to 1918 draft registration cards, and the federal censuses. That is the most promising untried avenue anywhere in this research, and his exact birth date is the key that would find him. The thing that would make you miss him is that Transylvanian Romanians of that period usually appear under Hungary or Austria-Hungary rather than Romania.

The correction: my grandmother was a Chiorean#

The grave cross at Aiud carries three names, and I had read the third one as belonging to a daughter of the first. It does not.

A 1949 baptism in the Dipșa register names the parents as Alexandru Conț, born and resident at Dipșa, and his wife Elena născ. Chiorean, born at Lechința. The child is alive, so he is not on this page, but the parents’ column is unambiguous: născ. means the maiden name.

So:

• Elena Chiorean, born 1923 at Lechința, is my grandmother, and her maiden name is Chiorean. She died in the late 1970s, past the line I have drawn, so the date stays in my notes.
• Ana Antohi, 1902 to 1962, is still one of my great-grandmothers, and family memory makes her Elena’s mother. She cannot be my grandfather’s mother, because his mother is documented as Marta Bartoș. So the reading that survives is that Ana married a Chiorean, and that man is my great-grandfather and has no name.
• Which means the cross does not show a mother and daughter under one surname. It shows a woman, her son-in-law, and her daughter under her married name.

Nothing has yet joined that chain up, and I want to be precise about where it breaks. Family memory makes Ana née Teoreanu; the grave makes her Antohi; the 1949 act makes her daughter Chiorean. Either Antohi is Ana’s own maiden name and the Teoreanu memory is wrong, or she was born Teoreanu, married a Chiorean, and later remarried an Antohi. The second reading requires discarding nothing and the first requires discarding a named brother, so the burden sits with the first. One question to my family settles it and no archive can: does anyone know of Antohi half-siblings of my grandmother? The second reading predicts people. The first forbids them.

Why she cannot be found, which is unusually specific#

Her own baptism should name both her parents in one line and end this. It is not findable online, and the reason is a scanning gap rather than the usual hundred-year rule.

Lechința’s Romanians were Greek Catholic, served from the parish office at Herina, and the register series has a hole from 1922 to 1929. One volume ends in 1921. The next begins in 1930. The volume catalogued to bridge them runs 1900 to 1925 on paper, but its attached scan stops in March 1921, and I checked that boundary page by page rather than assuming it: the file is a single 40-page PDF, strictly chronological, and its last page is register leaf 39. The catalogue gives the register as 46 leaves. So leaves 40 to 46, covering roughly 1921 to 1925, were never digitised, and one of them carries her baptism.

There is no Orthodox birth register for Lechința in the portal at all, under any inventory.

Requesting those seven leaves is the sharpest and cheapest request in this whole research. The record is marked publicly accessible with no restriction on physical use. Seven leaves would name her father, name her mother with her maiden surname, and decide between the two readings above in a single line.

And there is a real local negative in the meantime. I parsed the indexes of every Lechința register that is scanned: births 1892 to 1918, marriages 1869 to 1918, deaths 1888 to 1918, 1,870 rows between them. There is no Chiorean at Lechința in any register of any kind before 1921. No child born, no marriage, no death. So there is no sibling to find there and no father to catch as a bridegroom, and every reading of who her father was has an incomer in it.

Conț and Koncz are one name, which is the same trick as Uiorean and Ujvári#

This is the part of my mother’s side that rhymes with my father’s, and it has the same kind of proof behind it.

Hungarian Koncz and Romanian Conț are both pronounced /konts/. They are one name in two orthographies.

One letter, four men, both spellings#

On my father’s side the surname argument turns on Liptai Valér: one man written down by an Austro-Hungarian army clerk and by a Romanian village priest, under two different surnames, neither knowing about the other. There is an equivalent on my mother’s side, and it is better, because it is not two documents about one man. It is one document printed twice.

In 1907 the Romanian villagers of Bazéd and Mezőrücsi Néma, today Bozed and Nima Râciului in Mureș county, clubbed together and outbid the neighbouring Székely village for an estate belonging to Count Bethlen István, the future prime minister of Hungary. They then wrote to thank him. Three years later the Marosvásárhely paper Székely Lapok printed the letter in full, on 10 March 1910, inside a hostile profile of Bethlen headed “Ki ez a Bethlen István?”, the charge being that he had sold ancestral land to Romanians:

…ősi Kemény birtokot már eladja a bazédi oláhoknak, noha a szabédi székelyek is kérték.

Kelt Mezőrücsi Némában 1907. Covaciu Vaszilika, Covaciu Julius, Gora Vaszi, Degár Petru, Boer Lajos, Koncz Augusztin, Koncz Nikuláj, Illyés Lázár, Koncz Ávrám, Koncz Juon

Four years after that, the Romanian papers reprinted the same letter and turned every name back into Romanian. Drapelul of Lugoj on 6 May 1914 and Unirea of Blaj on 21 May 1914 both give the signatures as:

Vasilică Covaciu, Vasi Gora, Ludovic Boer, Niculaie Conț, Avram Conț, Iuliu Covaciu, Petru Dogar, Augustin Conț, Lazăr Hic, Ioan Conț

Koncz becomes Conț four times over, in one list. You can watch the translation happening in the other names too: Boer Lajos becomes Ludovic Boer, Degár Petru becomes Petru Dogar, Juon becomes Ioan, and poor Illyés Lázár comes out as the meaningless “Lazăr Hic”.

None of these four men is a relative of mine as far as I know. Bozed is a long way from any village my family is associated with, and nothing connects them but the surname. What the letter proves is the rule: searching for Conț without also searching Koncz will miss half of anything. That is worth more to me than another name would have been.

The document had a long afterlife, incidentally. Hungarian papers kept reprinting it to attack Bethlen for selling to Romanians and Romanian papers to celebrate the same fact: in 1914, again in Budapest in 1932, and once more in 1937. By then the man they were still arguing about had served ten years as prime minister and been out of office for six. The forenames drift across reprints, so the 1910 text is the one to quote.

The state itself used both spellings#

Buletinul Oficial, Partea a III-a, of 23 December 1970 carries a lost-licence notice:

Koncz Ștefan, domiciliat în comuna Lechința, str. Gării nr. 500, județul Bistrița-Năsăud, aduce la cunoștință pierderea permisului de conducere … pe numele de Konț Ștefan.

He reports himself as Koncz. The licence issued to him five months earlier was made out to Konț. One man, two spellings, two documents, one year, and it comes from the very commune where my grandmother was born.

The county press does the same thing with individuals months apart. The Alba paper prints a Moise Conț in 1973 and a Moise Koncz in 1972 and a Moise Kontz in 1974: three spellings of one name in one newspaper inside sixteen months. An Adalbert Conț at the Sebeș timber combine in February 1972 is Koncz Adalbert, director of the sawmill, that August. Same habit as Uiorean(ujvári), same county, same decade, a different family from mine.

So the spellings to carry are Conț, Cont, Koncz, Kontz, Konc and, rarely, Concz. And the two given-name systems have to be carried with them, because Koncz Miklós in a Hungarian document is Conț Nicolae in a Romanian one and no string search joins them.

Antohi and Antohe are also one name, and this one is documented rather than inferred. Buletinul Oficial of 19 November 1974 has an “Antohe Constantin … solicită schimbarea numelui său de familie din Antohe în acela de Antohi”, and there are petitions running the other way too. A court report in Gazeta de Iassi of 13 December 1895 calls its witness “Gh. Antohi” in one sentence and “Gh. Antohe” in the next. Antohie is the source of both, being the Romanian form of the given name Antioh, borne by the Moldavian prince Antohie Cantemir; Antohi, Antohe and Antofie are patronymics from it.

But Antochi is a trap. In Romanian orthography ch before e or i is /k/, so Antochi reads an-TO-ki and is a genuinely separate surname with its own bearers. In a foreign clerk’s hand it is the opposite, because German, Hungarian and Polish ch is /x/, so an Austro-Hungarian or Swiss clerk writing a Romanian /antohi/ would naturally spell it Antochi. Treat it as the same name only in foreign-authored records.

Chiorean: where the surname actually is, and one place in the right county#

My grandmother’s maiden name has been swept across every archive I have, and the result is a distribution and one real find.

The transcribed Transylvanian parish registers hold 923 records touching this surname, 1810 to 1923, gathered under three prefixes because the scribes wrote it Chior, Kior and Ciore. Grouped by county: Mureș 620, Alba 183, Cluj 120, and nothing anywhere else. The centre of gravity is the Gurghiu valley above Reghin, with a second cluster down the Mureș at Ocna Mureș and Turda. The Hungarian casualty index says the same thing independently on far fewer records: 55 men, nine of them from Alsó-Fehér and eight from Torda-Aranyos.

Elena Chiorean was born in 1923 in the one county where the surname is almost absent, and she ended her life in the county where it is thickest. That inverts the assumption I started with. A Chiorean at Lechința is the unusual case; a Chiorean around Aiud is the ordinary one.

But a distribution is not a homeland, and I got that wrong first. By the argument about the -ean suffix above, Chiorean is a name that could be coined independently in many places, and a dense distribution says where the bearers were numerous rather than where one family came from. The Gurghiu valley Chiorean, the Ocna Mureș Chiorean, the Feldioara Chiorean and the Hordou Chiorean are very likely four unrelated families. I wrote “heartland” once and took it out again. What the numbers give is a base rate, useful for saying that a Chiorean picked at random is likelier to be from Mureș than from Bistrița-Năsăud, and useless for tying my grandmother to any one of them.

The one real find is a village. In the whole Hungarian casualty index there is exactly one Beszterce-Naszód man of this surname, born 1891 at Hordó, today Coșbuc. That was worth following, and the Năsăud historical review Arhiva Someșană takes the same village back to the 1750s, twice:

• 4 April 1753. In a serfdom case brought against the Coșbuc family of Hordou, the royal table’s secretaries examined witnesses in the village. Witness 8 is “Gavril Chioranul, 52 a.”, with the notary’s marginal note that he is hostile to Coșbuc “fiind mânios pe Coșbuc pentrucă acesta i-a luat o grădină”, angry because Coșbuc had taken a garden off him. So a Gavril Chiorean of Hordou born about 1701, a man with land to lose, and the earliest Chiorean anywhere in this research by about a century.
• 17 March 1760. During the Someș peasant unrest, the Bistrița magistrate’s commissioners reported that at Hordou “cunoscutul Cihărean (Chiorean) în răspunsul său dat pentru întreg satul, limpede spuse…”, the well-known Chiorean answering for the whole village. The editor supplies the normalised spelling himself. In the district’s written reply of the same year the Chioran family of Hordou were denounced by a Coșbuc as serfs of the Kemény family and held for a time by the magistrate, at a cost to them of 670 florins, which is a large sum.

Read together those are one feud: in 1753 a Chiorean deposes against a Coșbuc over a garden, and by 1760 a Coșbuc has denounced the whole Chiorean family as somebody’s serfs.

What it is worth, and what it is not. It establishes Chiorean as a native Bistrița-Năsăud surname with a definite seat, continuously attested at Hordou from 1753 to 1891. It does not connect Hordou to Lechința, forty kilometres south, and it does not name my grandmother’s father. It turns “the one other place in that county to try” from a hunch resting on one casualty card into a documented three-century presence.

The one candidate household with the right geography and the right age is at Archiud, ten kilometres from Lechința: a Teodor Chiorean born 10 July 1889 who married Anica Rad in 1911 and whose children are documented to 1917. He would have been 34 in 1923. That is geography and age alone, and it is not evidence.

Three names, and a grave at Aiud#

All three of the documented people on this side are buried on one cross in the Roman Catholic cemetery at Aiud, which I read in August 2026. It gives Antohi Ana 1902 to 1962 and Conț Alexandru 1923 to 1964; the third line carries a death in the late 1970s, which is past the line I have drawn, so I am not printing it.

Two corrections came out of that cross, and both are mine. I record them because the mistakes are more useful than the facts they replaced.

The cemetery is multi-faith, and the burial says nothing about anybody’s confession. My family cleared that up in August 2026: the ground at Aiud takes more than one rite, and the plot was taken in the circumstances of a sudden death rather than chosen. So the whole argument I had built on the words “Roman Catholic cemetery” falls away. I had constructed three explanations for it: Ana as a Csángó Catholic from the Moldavian Catholic country; the Conț side as Greek Catholics using Roman Catholic ground after their church was suppressed in 1948; and my grandmother’s Hungarian second husband. Each was invented to explain a fact that turns out not to need explaining. Five sections of inference rested on a signboard. Before reasoning from a proper name, it is worth asking what the name is actually attached to, and if the answer needs a local to confirm it, ask before writing the argument.

Ana was moved into that plot from another cemetery after her death, so the grave is not evidence that she ever lived at Aiud. I had read her presence on the cross as the first evidence that she followed her daughter south. It is not evidence of that at all. A reburial is arranged by the living: my grandmother could have brought her mother in from anywhere, and the fact that she did says something about my grandmother rather than about where Ana spent her life. A single cross bearing three deaths seventeen years apart was in any case almost certainly cut after the last of them.

Everything on this side now turns on one question: which cemetery was she moved from. A Romanian death is registered where it happens. If she was first buried elsewhere in Aiud, which is the commoner case, she did die there and the 1962 entry is an Aiud document. If she was brought from Lechința or wherever she actually died, then Aiud holds no death record for her at all and the most valuable document in this research is filed in another town. It would also put the Lechința placing back at full strength, because the reason it came under strain was that Ana turned up dead in Alba.

The reburial is itself a document. Romanian practice requires an authorisation to exhume and rebury, issued by the town hall with the public-health office, and cemetery administrations keep a register of plot concessions and of remains brought in. Any of those three names the cemetery she came from, which makes the Aiud cemetery office a cheaper and more certain request than any register, and one that nobody has to remember anything for.

Antohi is not a Transylvanian name#

Family memory puts Ana at Lechința, which is a Transylvanian Saxon village attested as such since 1333, when the papal conscription lists record a Johannes plebanus de Lekenche. It is Romanian-majority only in the modern era. An Antohi household in a Saxon village always read as an arrival from somewhere else, and the surname evidence agrees emphatically.

Crossed against Lechința, Dipșa, Bistrița-Năsăud or Năsăud in the Arcanum press archive, under every spelling, Antohi returns nothing at all. Antohi appears in no indexed Bistrița-Năsăud register either, and those birth indexes cover 1892 to 1918. Every concentration of the name is Moldavian or Bessarabian: Iași, Bacău, Vaslui, Roman, Vrancea, Covurlui, Cahul, Cetatea Albă. A single gazette page of teacher postings in the Fălciu and Vaslui district in October 1945 names four Antohis within a few lines, two of them a married couple holding posts 1 and 2 at the same village school. The Bistrița district names none, ever.

Nor is the name in the transcribed Transylvanian parish registers: 145,000 records, 1813 to 1923, with a search that matches parent fields too, and not one Antohi was born, married or died in any parish they cover. Every apparent hit is Antonie, a large and well documented family at my father’s village, which is a different surname.

Family memory points the same way. Ana Antohi was born a Teorean, and her brother was a mayor at Ivești, which is in Galați, in Moldova. That makes the surname native to the family instead of anomalous, and it explains what an Antohi household was doing in a Saxon village: it had arrived from the east.

Neither maternal surname was at Lechința or Dipșa in 1761, and here is the list that proves it. Arhiva Someșană printed, in its 1937 volume, the returns of a commission sent round the Saxon villages of the Bistrița district after the Orthodox reoccupation of the churches in January 1761. The Saxon comes sent the magistrate a sheet of nine questions and ordered an inquiry in every Romanian-inhabited village of the district, the first eight to be answered collectively and the ninth by each man separately, and the work was done between 25 May and 1 June 1761. So it is a house-by-house census of the Romanians of these villages, at a named date.

Lechința gives twenty-two named men, with no church in the village, attending Vermeș: Petre Moldovan, Todor Roman, Ilie Roman, Vasile Roman, Vasile Ghindan, Dumitru Bota, Ștefan Bidian, Onul Moroșan, Ilieș Rognean, Petrișor Ceterașul, the shepherd Ion Adace, Lupul Borgovan, Dumitru Leșan, Maxim Iencian, Grigore Opre, Alexa Ilieș, Onul Bidian, Petre Bota, Ursul Borgovan, Onul Alb, Gavrilă Alb and the shepherd Filip Beșa.

Dipșa gives ten, all declaring themselves non-Uniate: the village priests Filip Sântioan and Gavrilă Negrea, Andreica Moldovan, Costin Zăgrean, George Moldovan, Toader Sângeorzan, the shepherds Arsinte Boar and Petrea Nedii, Petre Arsente and Vasile Baci.

No Antohi, no Conț or Koncz, and no Chiorean, in either village or in any of the eighteen others in the same return. Read carefully that is heads of household and not a register, so it cannot exclude a servant, a landless man or a family that arrived the next year. What it does say is that none of these surnames belonged to the settled Romanian households of either village in 1761. All of them arrived later, and the Conț demonstrably did, from Coșma.

The practical use is the surname stock to expect in the Bistrița archive’s books: Moldovan, Roman, Bota, Borgovan, Zăgrean, Bidian, Alb, Sângeorzan, Negrea, Opre, Moroșan. An Antohi or a Chiorean marrying into one of those names is a match worth something.

And it corrects the address to ask for. The same volumes show the Romanians of Lechința and Dipșa being refused a church site for decades, to the point of a complaint in the 1750s that “copiii trebue să le moară nebotezați”. Lechința’s Romanians were still walking to Vermeș in 1761. So for anything before about 1800 the register to ask the Bistrița archive for is Vermeș, and Lechința’s own books only begin once it had a parish of its own.

And the eastern route into these villages is documented, from 1630#

The reasoning above says an Antohi household in a Saxon village reads most economically as an arrival from the east, and the twentieth century offers plenty of mechanisms: the 1921 agrarian reform, the displacements of 1940 to 1944, the confiscation of Saxon property in 1945. Arhiva Someșană shows the channel was open three centuries earlier and ran through these exact villages.

A Bistrița magistrate’s decision of 20 April 1630:

“Valahilor din Moldova li-se îngăduie loc de așezare în comuna Vermiș până când va sufla vânt mai pacinic în Moldova… Mai mulți însă decât 12 pater familias nu vor fi primiți.”

Romanians from Moldova were formally admitted to settle at Vermeș, capped at twelve heads of household, on condition they helped the Saxons and paid the same dues. And an investigation of 15 April 1749 names the people: twelve Romanian men of Vermeș were interrogated and described as “parte născuți în Vermiș, parte veniți din Petriș, Lechința, Serețel, Maieru, Leșu, Vărarea și din Moldova”. They stated there were then 24 Romanian families in the village, and that about fifty Romanians at Sângeorz and Lechința belonged to their church.

No Antohi, and this proves nothing about mine. What it does is move the eastern reading off plausible reasoning and onto a route that demonstrably existed: this precise cluster of villages absorbed Moldavian Romanians by formal permission from 1630 and was still recording arrivals din Moldova in 1749.

Teoreanu Martin, gendarme, who would reconcile the two geographies#

If Ana Antohi was born a Teorean and her brother was a mayor at Ivești, then that brother is the single most useful person to find on this side. Family memory now gives him a forename, Martin, and writes the surname with the final u. There is a documented man of that name and the right age, and the identification is still a hypothesis.

Four gazette entries are the whole of him in print:

He was born in 1895, and this is what dates him. The 1913 recruitment law puts a man before the recruitment council in the year he turns twenty-one and then names his contingent after the year following that, so a Romanian contingent number is the birth year plus twenty-two. Oradea town hall printed the whole conversion in a 1924 notice calling men in to have their booklets stamped: contingent 1918 is the men born in 1896, contingent 1917 the men born in 1895, and so on back to 1880. So contingent 1917 means born 1895. Ana was born in 1902, and a brother born in 1895 fits without strain. Until this, nothing dated him at all.

And the Cluj tie is the point, on two documents rather than one inference. The gendarmerie’s Cluj inspectorate covered Bistrița-Năsăud, and Lechința is in it. The 1941 item files him under “Insp. Cluj”, which is a clerk’s heading; the 1938 notice says the Cluj inspectorate issued his military booklet, which is the authority that put the document in his hand. Gendarmes were posted far from home as a matter of policy, so a Moldavian Teoreanu serving in Transylvania in the 1920s and 1930s is exactly the mechanism that would put this family at Lechința for a period and then return it east, which would let both halves of family memory be true at once instead of competing. He went to the reserve on 31 December 1937, so the Cluj service belongs to the 1920s and 1930s, which is when Ana would have been marrying.

One correction, because I had this item wrong. The 1941 entry is not a pension award and is not evidence that he was serving in 1941. Reading the head of the list shows it is a Council of Ministers journal of 11 August 1941 confirming a one-off state bond rent of 80,000 lei to 6,586 already-pensioned re-engaged men under the re-engagement law of 1913. Dossier 7.631 is his number in that bond operation. It is still a specific file reference worth requesting, but it is a rent file, not a service record, and a gendarme’s service memoir is not what it will contain.

I want the whole thing read as a hypothesis. Nothing in any of the four documents mentions Ivești, Tecuci, Galați or a mayoralty, and nothing links this gendarme to Ana. What he has going for him is that he is the right age and demonstrably tied to Transylvania. That is two more things than a name in a memory has, and it is a long way short of a person. The gazette sweep for a mayor of Ivești also came back clean: no Teorean or Teoreanu is mayor there in any period, though Ivești in Tecuci county was a commune, a separate market town with its own mayor, the seat of a sub-county district and the seat of a rural court all at once, and commune mayors reach the national gazette far less consistently than town ones.

The only Teoreanu household the archives can name, and it is in the wrong province#

Martin was searched for across every archive I have, on his two hard facts, and he is in none of them. The transcribed Transylvanian parish registers hold no Teorean or Teoreanu at all, in 110 years and every county, which is worth more than it looks: whatever put a Teoreanu in the Cluj gendarmerie inspectorate, it was not that he came from there. What the sweep found instead is the first Teoreanu family any archive can name.

The context is typhus, not battle. The very next act in the same register is another twenty-year-old of contingent 1918, dead the same day at the same cantonment, and his cause is written out: de tifos exantematic. Negrești held a billet of the Romanian army wintering in Moldova, and the register is full of them, sheet after sheet, in the first days of March 1917.

He is also in the gazette, which is how the act and the print confirm each other. Monitorul Oficial of 10 December 1917 prints Marele Cartier General, Lista de pierderi No. 198, of 10 March 1917, and under b) TRUPĂ, Morți, Soldați it names a Teoreanu of the same regiment number. A General Headquarters loss list closed nine days after this death.

What that does to Martin’s dating is the whole reason it is here.

Consecutive classes, one year apart, on a surname the National Archives hold four bearers of in total. Two brothers born 1895 and 1896 is the most ordinary thing in the world. It is also not proof of anything, and I want that said plainly: nothing in Simion’s act mentions Martin, Ana, Ivești or Lechința, and the whole of the argument is a rare surname plus arithmetic. The reason to write it down is that it is testable, which almost nothing else on this side is. If Mihai and Maria Teoreanu of Călărași are Martin’s parents then they are Ana’s too, and Ana Antohi was born at Călărași in 1902, not in Moldova. The town’s civil registers survive complete, year by year, in the Călărași county branch, and none of them is digitised. The cheap version of that letter is to ask first for Simion’s own 1896 birth, which his death act guarantees is there: if Călărași comes back with no such entry, the whole reading collapses in one reply.

Where the surname sits is therefore an open question again. The press evidence for Ivești, Tecuci, Galați and Brăila is real and unchanged, and it is the reason the family memory reads straight. But every Teoreanu the archives themselves hold is Muntenian: Călărași, Bucharest, Câmpina. Either the family is Muntenian and reached Ivești in Martin’s own generation, which a gendarme posted around the country is exactly the sort of man to have done, or Călărași is a coincidence of surname.

One spelling note, because it decides where to search. Teorean with no final u has no Moldavian bearers at all: its cluster is Arad and Bihor, in Crișana, three hundred kilometres the wrong way, and its best-documented bearer is an Ioan Teorean, econom of Mădăraș in Bihor, elected on 13 November 1918 as a delegate to the Great National Assembly at Alba Iulia. Teoreanu with the u is the Old Kingdom form, and it is the one that turns up at Ivești, Tecuci and Brăila. That is the ordinary Transylvanian against Regat pattern for Romanian surnames, and it means the two may be one name in two forms or two unrelated families. Search both. Do not confuse either with Tritean on my father’s side, or with Chiorean, which Hungarian military clerks wrote Tyiorean. Teorean, Tritean, Chiorean and Uiorean are four different surnames, and by the argument about the suffix above they are four separate coinages that happen to rhyme.

One method note, because it cost a month. The archive’s attachment-text search matches whole words and not substrings. Teorean returns twelve records and Teoreanu returns three, and the two sets do not overlap. An earlier sweep ran only the first, concluded “twelve hits, none in Galați”, and never saw the three registers that carry the family. Every -ean surname in this research has to be swept in both endings.

The Conț at Coșma, at Bozed, and in the war lists#

Two things independently confirm that the Conț were a settled family at the village they came from and not at the one they moved to.

The Austro-Hungarian casualty index is searchable by birthplace, and Kozmatelke, that is Coșma, gives 29 loss events, one of them a Koncz Miklós born 1893, wounded and then killed on 14 August 1915. Coșma is where Vasile Conț was born about 1822, so on the arithmetic this man is his grandson or great-grandson. He is not on my direct line and I am not going to pretend he is, but he is the first Conț of Coșma documented by something other than a register, and he shows the family was still there in the 1890s, two generations after Vasile left.

Bazéd, that is Bozed, gives fourteen loss events including two men both called Koncz Ágost, born 1885 and 1895. Two men, one name, ten years apart, in the same village where six Conț men were prosperous enough to club together and outbid a Székely village for a magnate’s estate between 1907 and 1912. That is what a settled family with a repeating forename looks like.

And the negative cuts the right way. Dipse gives nine loss events and not one Koncz. More than that, a sweep of the surname against the whole county across all 1.5 million records returns one man, born 1887 at a village that is neither Dipșa nor Lechința. The Conț were not a numerous Bistrița-Năsăud family before 1918. They were numerous at Coșma and at Bozed, in Kolozs and Maros-Torda. That fits the reading the register already gave: Dipșa is where my branch was living, not where the family is from, and it puts more weight on Coșma than anything else here.

For the generation before the registers there is a call number and no images. The Transylvanian urbarial conscription of 1819 to 1820 catalogues a booklet for Kozmatelke, and Vasile Conț was born there about 1822, so his father should be a head of household in it. One structural warning from the same catalogue: Dipșa, Lechința and Vermeș appear in the 1750 fiscal census but in neither urbarial conscription, because those villages sat in the Saxon Bistrița district and outside the serf system the urbarial regulations addressed. For the Bistrița-Năsăud villages, 1750 is the only one of the four conscriptions that will ever hold them.

Going further back than that, the medieval holdings say one thing worth having. In 1496 and 1497 the right of patronage over the churches of Lechința, Dipșa and Dumitra was granted to the magistrate of Bistrița, so the two villages my mother’s family lived in were one ecclesiastical unit under Bistrița by the 1490s. That says nothing at all about either surname. It does show that the pairing of the two places is old, which is worth knowing before reading anything into their being ten kilometres apart in the twentieth century.

The front went through Lechința in October 1944#

Not genealogy, but it is the world my grandparents were standing in when they were 21. The Hungarian records of soldiers taken into Soviet captivity list twelve men captured at Szászlekence between 13 September and 20 October 1944, ten of them on the 12th, 13th and 14th of October, from border-guard and reserve battalions thrown in front of the Soviet advance. All twelve died in Soviet camps, between December 1944 and October 1947, at Magnitogorsk, Cherepovets, Sevastopol and elsewhere.

None of them is family. What it documents is that the front went through Lechința in the second week of October 1944, while Elena Chiorean was 21 and living there and Alexandru Conț was 21 at Dipșa, fifteen kilometres away.

The accident at Aiud#

My grandfather was killed at the Întreprinderea Metalurgică Aiud, during the pouring of molten metal, which places him in the foundry or the steel shop. The county paper confirms both existed and were being worked and expanded in exactly that period: a new charge being tapped in the iron foundry in October 1971, three new works under construction in February 1972 including a steel foundry, work on the steel furnaces in March 1973, and in January 1974 a hundred and seventy workers of the foundry section given medical examinations, the foundry being treated as a hazardous place to work.

The grave dates the accident to 1964, correcting family memory by two years. That does not open it up, and the reason is a property of what the press of that period was willing to print rather than of my searching.

I swept the whole run of the county paper for it, and the pattern is consistent. Work accidents are discussed in aggregate and in the safety-campaign register, never as named fatalities: headlines about accidents as a defect of production, about labour protection not meaning the protection of shortcomings, and endless pieces on how much was spent on protective equipment. The paper does name the dead in traffic accidents. The one collective work accident reported in detail in these years concerns the Jiu valley mines and names no victims. And the two archives that hold a local paper for the year of the accident do not exist: the Alba county paper begins in 1968 and the Cluj regional daily begins in 1968, so there is no Alba or Cluj local press in the archive before that at all.

I re-ran everything against 1964 and 1965 once the grave gave the year, and the result was identical to the run against 1962. Getting the year right did not help, which is itself the proof that the obstacle was never the year. Even the trade union paper, whose holdings do go back to 1953 and whose beat was literally workplace safety, never named a fatal accident victim in this period.

So the accident is not findable in a newspaper. Where it can still be found is the Aiud civil register of deaths for 1964, which gives his age, parents, address and cause in one entry; a prosecution or breach-of-labour-protection investigation file, since a death during metal pouring would have triggered one; and the plant’s own mandatory accident investigation record, if it survived the works’ restructuring.

Why the Antohi side is still thin, and what would change it#

The Conț half of this section is documented now. The other half is not, and the reasons are worth setting out because they are all properties of the sources rather than of the family.

• The seven leaves. My grandmother’s baptism is on leaves 40 to 46 of one named register at the Bistrița-Năsăud branch, catalogued and never scanned. That single request names her father, gives her mother’s maiden surname, and decides between the two readings of Ana Antohi in one line. Nothing else on this side is that cheap.
• The Aiud cemetery office, before any register. Ana was moved into the plot from another cemetery, and the exhumation authorisation, the public-health paperwork and the cemetery’s own register of remains received each name the cemetery she came from. That is the one document that says which town’s registrar holds her 1962 death entry, and it does not depend on anybody’s memory.
• The 1962 death entry, wherever it is filed. A Romanian death act names the deceased’s parents and birthplace. That one line would settle Ivești against Lechința, name Ana’s father, and confirm or destroy the Teoreanu maiden name all at once. It is still the single most valuable document identified anywhere in this research.
• The civil registers are not in an archive, and cannot be. I checked this properly. Alba’s digitised civil registers are the Hungarian-era series, 1895 to 1918 and nothing later, and every volume carries a hundred-year protection category, because civil registers pass to the National Archives only after a century. In 2026 the archives hold up to roughly 1920. A 1962 register will not reach them until the 2060s. There is no separate later Alba collection, no town-level Aiud council fond, and no parish registers deposited there. Do not write to the Alba branch for these. They are with a registrar.
• Ivești is shut at the catalogue. The Ivești commune archive exists as a fond covering 1864 to 1967, and a search beneath it returns the fond record and nothing else: no series, no dossiers, no register list, no attachments. It is catalogued at fond level only. So the Antohi and Teoreanu registers of Ivești are a letter to the Galați branch and not an online search.
• The surnames fight back. Conț searched without diacritics also matches cont, the Romanian for “account”, so a plain search for it in an archive full of interwar bank balance sheets returns ten thousand hits and no people; the fix is an exact-text query, and it drops 10,896 hits to 72. Antohi as a full-text search returns 1,577 hits because it matches every longer name beginning the same way. Cunțan and Conțiu are separate surnames one letter away, and a search snippet will clip Conțiu to Conț and hand you a stranger. In Romanian text, Ivești matches inside privești and Antohi inside pantofi, so every short surname needs word boundaries.
• And a search snippet will manufacture the coincidence you are hoping for. Newspaper pages carry several unrelated articles, and the snippet extractor welds fragments from across them into one plausible-looking sentence. There is no Antohi at Lechința in the Bistrița paper: all four hits that look like one are a library reader in a different commune, named twenty lines away in a separate report on the same page. One snippet fused three places at once and two of the wrong ones were districts my family actually lived in. Nothing on this side is usable until the whole page has been read, and that is the single most important rule here.

One more thing about a negative I used to treat as meaningful. The absence of Antohi from the Bistrița paper for the 1950s is weaker than it looks, for an administrative reason: that paper is the paper of the Bistrița district, and until the end of 1960 Lechința was not in it. The issue of 31 December 1960 prints the reorganisation that transferred the commune in from a neighbouring district. So for the decade the paper was swept for, Lechința was somebody else’s district. That is the same class of error as reading a database’s coverage gap as a finding: a silence that was really a boundary.

The living members of this family are of course the best source of all, and they are not on this page.

The archives#

Seven of them, and the page above says which fact came from which. They are set out in the order they mattered.

hpdt.ro, the transcribed parish registers#

The Historical Population Database of Transylvania at hpdt.ro is a research project of Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj together with UiT The Arctic University of Norway, funded through the EEA and Norway Grants. It transcribes Transylvanian parish registers into a searchable database: at the time I used it, 70,225 births, 19,530 marriages and 55,696 deaths, running from roughly 1813 to 1923.

What makes it valuable is the level of detail retained. A birth record carries not just names and dates but both parents’ denominations, occupations, residences and birthplaces. Death records carry age to the day, cause of death, and burial place. That is what makes it possible to distinguish two men with the same name in the same village.

It also preserves the transcribers’ uncertainty rather than smoothing it away, which I appreciate: square brackets for illegible text as in Miha[Il], %...% and @ and & for alternative readings, ?? for a guess. The database is a transcription of what the priest actually wrote, not a tidied version of it, and the messiness is the evidence.

Without this project none of the nineteenth century on my father’s side would be reachable at all. It is also the source that produced this page’s most persistent trap. Its place field matches the present-day locality name, exactly, so Feldioara returns nothing while Războieni Cetate returns 6,315 records for the same parish. I read four blank place queries as coverage negatives before testing the mechanism, and one of those blanks is the whole reason my mother’s side sat undocumented for months: the database covers neither Aiud nor Teiuș nor anywhere in Bistrița-Năsăud, so its silence about the Conț and the Antohi says nothing whatever about them. Test the field on a place you know is there before believing any blank.

The National Archives of Romania, descopera#

The discovery portal of the National Archives at descopera.arhivelenationale.ro is the catalogue of Romania’s county archive branches, from whole fonds down to individual documents. It produced more ancestors than anything else here, on both sides, and I had never searched it: every earlier note in my files about the National Archives is a note to write a letter to a county branch.

Two things about it change what can be done from a desk.

The catalogue searches the text of attached files. The fielded search exposes a field for the text content of attachments, and searching it reaches inside the PDFs hanging off records rather than only the archivist’s description. Since each digitised civil register carries a typed index as an attachment, this amounts to a name index of the digitised Romanian civil registers, nationwide, queryable by surname.

And those index PDFs are text, not scans. pdftotext pulls them out perfectly and instantly. I wasted a rendering pass and sixty-two pages of optical character recognition on one before checking. The register pages themselves are still images and still need eyes.

The register scans come as 90 to 100 megabyte chunks of 25 to 145 pages, with no stated relation between chunk number and act number, so the mapping has to be worked out from page counts and then checked against an act number visible in the corner of a rendered page. I got it wrong by two pages on the first try and by one on the second, both times catching it because the page’s own act number disagreed with the index. Always verify the offset against the number written on the page.

Arcanum#

Arcanum at adt.arcanum.com is a large commercial digital archive of Hungarian and Romanian newspapers, periodicals and official gazettes, with full-text search and named-entity indexing. It is the reason I have most of what is here about the twentieth century, and the reason I can explain the surname.

A disclaimer on how I searched it. I queried Arcanum through a Model Context Protocol server I wrote myself. It is a custom, unofficial integration: not built by Arcanum, not endorsed by them, not supported by them, and not affiliated with them in any way. It is a thin wrapper around their public search, written for my own convenience. Anyone reproducing this work should just use the site directly. If any of my Arcanum citations are wrong, the fault is mine or my wrapper’s, not the archive’s. The same applies to every other archive on this list: I reached all of them through wrappers of my own, and any misreading here is mine.

Digiteca Bibliotecii Metropolitane București#

digibuc.ro holds Monitorul Oficial scanned and full-text searchable across the whole interwar and immediate post-war period, in all its parts. That makes it a different kind of source from a newspaper archive: the gazette does not mention people in passing, it prints them because the state did something to them. Every hit from it on this page is an administrative act with a date and usually a file number.

It gave me my grandfather’s teaching career from 1941 to 1948, the 1947 CFR dismissal list that names three family surnames at one station, and the four documents that date Teoreanu Martin. It also gave me an interwar official gazetteer of the annexed provinces which settles four of the place-name collisions above and states the Uioara equals Marosújvár equivalence flatly, in a government reference work, rather than leaving it inferred.

BCU Cluj#

The Lucian Blaga Central University Library’s collection at documente.bcucluj.ro is 153 digitised Transylvanian periodicals from the 1790s to 1950. It is a different archive from Arcanum in a way that matters: it holds the Transylvanian Romanian church, school and learned press, much of which is not in Arcanum at all. Diocesan weeklies, county teachers’ bulletins, ASTRA’s review and annual, the historical reviews of the Năsăud and Blaj circles. That is the right shape of source for a family of Orthodox village farmers, because a village Econom who never made the news could still surface in a donation list or a parish notice.

Not one member of either family was found in it, across fourteen titles and five passes. What it produced is the frame around them: the parish and the school my grandfather attended, the 1761 census, the 1630 settlement permission, the 1918 incident at the station, and the whole of Romul Tritean.

Two lessons from it are worth more than most of the finds. Almost all download failures are transient, and a plateau under load is not evidence of anything. One year of the diocesan weekly reported thirty-one issues unreadable, then twenty-two, then fourteen, then thirteen twice running, so I wrote those thirteen down as genuinely missing. Re-run the next day against a rested server, the same year returned all fifty-two issues, and the recovered issues held the Romul Tritean donation, the railwaymen’s church choir and the 1918 station incident. And carry every historical form of a place name: the same paper calls the village Feldioara in 1924 and Războieni-Cetate in 1927, and the 1924 spelling Răsboeni is the one that nearly cost me the best find in the library.

The Hungarian National Archives#

AdatbazisokOnline at adatbazisokonline.mnl.gov.hu is about 148 separate databases holding 6.6 million records: censuses, the First World War loss lists, state civil registers, microfilmed parish registers, Soviet camp prisoner rolls and more.

One rule governs everything in it for a family like mine. Hungary digitised the second copies of registers it still holds, and Transylvania’s second copies went with the territory to Romania in 1920, which is why they sit on the Romanian portal and not in Budapest. So this is not a register archive for either of my lines, and no amount of searching will make it one. What it is instead is the best person-level war archive for these villages, and the only catalogue of the pre-register conscriptions.

It gave me the second Ujvári of the village killed in 1914, the whole village’s 28 loss events, the Conț of Coșma and Bozed in the casualty lists, the Chiorean distribution, the twelve men captured at Lechința in 1944, and twenty-three exact shelf marks for four conscriptions between 1713 and 1820. It also closed two doors properly, on coverage rather than on a blank search, which is the more useful half of the exercise.

Two method notes, because both cost me a wrong conclusion. An AND with a parenthesised OR group silently does not constrain, so a query for one surname across three counties returned records from six others; query one county at a time. And fuzzy place matching is on and it is loud: every hit prints its own confidence, and in one database Székesfehérvár scores 0.69 against Székelyföldvár and Kispest scores 0.73 against Dipse. Read the score before believing the place.

Arhiva Medievală#

arhivamedievala.ro holds the digitised medieval holdings of the National Archives, roughly 1000 to 1600, with a Romanian abstract, name and place indexes and page scans for most documents.

No family surname appears in it and none was ever likely to. The records are charters of kings, princes, voivodes, noble families, Saxon town magistrates and cathedral chapters, and 1600 is two centuries before the parish registers start. What it gave is the three documents about my father’s village, the 1490s patronage grants that pair my mother’s two villages, and the 1585 charter that ties the surname’s parent town to a royal salt chamber. This archive is close to exhausted for this family, and what is left in it is reading three scans.

Method#

I did not do this by hand. All seven archives are searchable, and the work was in figuring out how to search them rather than in reading.

Starting point. My grandfather’s birth record, hpdt.ro/tlooks/430, which names his parents and their occupations. From there it is a matter of walking backwards: each birth record names both parents, so you look for the father’s own birth record, confirm it against his age on his marriage record, and repeat.

The parish search is a prefix match, not a substring match. This mattered more than anything else. Searching Uior returns 41 births, Uiorean returns 40, and iorean returns nothing at all. Guessing spellings would have quietly missed every variant I had not thought of, and given the list below, that would have been most of them. So instead of guessing I swept the two-letter prefixes Ui and Uj, which between them catch every form the scribes used, plus Litean and Liptai for my great-grandmother’s side and Sanisl, Szani and Stanisl for my grandmother’s. That returned 819 records, which I filtered down to 214 by matching the surname clusters and excluding the unrelated Uifelean and Ujfalusi families.

Two later sweeps, and each one exposed the limits of the first. The prefix Trit returns 275 records, and that is where everything above about Erodița Tritean’s parents and the bishop’s household comes from. The prefixes Chior, Kior and Ciore return 923, which is the Chiorean corpus on my mother’s side. Both are reminders that the first sweep was built around three surnames and stops dead at the fourth.

The search also matches any name field, mother and father and groom and bride, not just the subject. That is what catches the women, who otherwise vanish from a surname search the moment they marry. Which makes the one thing it does not do worth stating twice: a register index lists only the registered person, so a generation above the indexed one is invisible to name search and can only be found by opening acts. That is how both of the deepest generations on this page were found, and it is why both of them came out of a death act rather than a birth.

Establishing sibling sets. Grouping every birth by parent couple, allowing for spelling drift in the given names, is what turns a pile of records into families. It is also what exposed the two Vichentie problem: two couples, two different mothers, two different occupations, one name.

Ages at death are the best dating tool in these registers. They are given to the day, like 61y8m7d, which is how I have estimated birth dates for people whose own birth record does not survive. They are exactly as reliable as the clerk’s arithmetic.

Cross-checking. The parish records, the state registers, the gazettes and the newspapers are independent sources, which is the point of using all of them. The parish register gave me Valeriu Litean born 1 May 1895; the Hungarian army gazette gave me Liptai Valér born 1895 at Székelyföldvár. Neither source knows about the other, and that is what makes the Litean and Liptai identity a finding rather than a guess. The same pattern runs through this page: the American’s 1929 gazette petition against the extract his own baptismal row records being issued a month later; Simion Teoreanu’s death act against the loss list closed nine days after it; Dochia Mureșan in a 1902 marriage act against the same woman in a 1927 court index.

Read the page, never the snippet. This is the rule that cost me the most. A newspaper page carries several unrelated articles, and a search snippet welds fragments from across them into one plausible-looking sentence. It has handed me a railwayman who was a timber man, a station master who was a carpenter, an Antohi at Lechința who was a library reader fifteen kilometres away, and a party secretary in Aiud who was a Sălaj man on a page that happened to name three of my family’s districts within a few column-inches. Any hit whose value depends on two facts sitting near each other in a snippet is worthless until the page is read. Reading full pages has also caught misreadings of my own twice, in a name-change column and in a list of names I had the wrong end of.

And derived facts must not be quoted back as testimony. This is the one error that does not announce itself. My notes had the accident year from family memory, calculated my mother’s age from it, and wrote that down as a consequence, correctly labelled. Sessions later, when the grave gave a different year, I read my own arithmetic back off the page as though it were something the family had said, and reported a conflict between family memory and the gravestone. There was no conflict and no such testimony. An inference had been laundered into a witness by nothing more than sitting on the page long enough to look like one. It is the same failure as the snippet fusion, moved indoors: two things that were never connected end up adjacent and get read as one statement. The archive version is easy to catch, because pulling the page settles it. The internal version is harder, because there is no page to pull.

Every newspaper and gazette reference on my father’s side#

The parish registers stop in 1923. Everything I know after that came out of the press and the gazettes, so here is the full list of what they turned up, in date order. The fifty-year rule applies: I hold later items and they are not listed. The maternal citations are given inline in the section on my mother’s side rather than repeated here.

Nine of these I read in full rather than trusting a search snippet, and two of the readings changed as a result: the 1907 name-change column, where a stitched snippet had reordered the list and given the wrong new surname, and the 1947 gazette, whose heading turns a CFR staff list into a mass dismissal.

All the names in these records#

Collected for anyone searching for a relative. The registers preserve whatever the clerk wrote, including his uncertainty, so one family can hide behind dozens of strings. Square brackets are the transcriber marking illegible text, %...% and @ and & and / mark alternative readings, and ?? is a guess. I have left the clerical slips in, because they are what is actually in the database and therefore what you have to search for.

Uiorean, and its Hungarian form Ujvári#

39 distinct spellings in the parish registers, which reduce to these name forms:

Roșca, Uioran, Uiorean, Uiorean Uivari, Uiorean Ujvari, Uiorean Ujvári, Uioreanu, Uiuorean, Uiuvorean, Uivari, Uivărean, Uiórean, Uiărean, Ujeorán, Ujuorean, Ujuoren, Ujuorieanu, Ujuvorean, Ujuvoreanu, Ujuvorán, Ujuărean, Ujvári, Ujvári E

As literally written, most frequent first, transcription marks and all:

Uiorean; Uiuorean; Uiărean; Ujuorean; [Uiărean]; [Uiorean]; Ujvári; Uiuvorean; Ujuvoreanu&Uiărean; Uiorean(ujvári); [Uiuorean]; [Uiuvorean]; [Ujuvoreanu&Uiărean]; Ui[ărean??]; Uioran; Ujuorieanu&Uiărean; Ujuărean; Ujvári(uiorean); %Roșca%Uiărean; %Uiorean%; %Uivari% Uiărean; %Ujuvorán%; [Uiărean??]; [Ujuorieanu&Uiărean]; [Ujuărean]; U[I]Orean; Ui??ărean; Uiorean Uivari; Uiorean Ujvari; Uiorean Ujvári; Uioreanu; Uivari; Uivărean; Uiórean; Uiă[Rea]N; Ujeorán; Ujuoren; Ujuvorean; Ujvári E

And the Hungarian state registers add five more that never reached print: Ujvoreán, Ujvorán, Ujvarán, Ujvoán, Ujórán. Those forms are worth knowing because a sweep of the state register index on Ujvári alone finds about a third of what is there.

Sanislav, and its byname Lup#

19 distinct spellings in the parish registers, which reduce to these name forms:

Lup, Sanislau, Sanislau Lup, Sanislav, Sanislav Lup, Sanislavu, Stanislau, Stanislavu, Szaniszlau, Szaniszlav, Szaniszlavu, Szaniszlo, Szaniszláv, Szaniszló, Szanisztás

As literally written, most frequent first:

Sanislau; Sanislav; Sanislavu; Sanislau Lup; Szaniszlo; Szaniszláv; Lup(sanislau); Lup/ Sanislau; Stanislau; [Stanislau]; Sanislav Alias Lup; Sanislav Lup; Sanislav??; Stanislavu; Szaniszlau; Szaniszlav; Szaniszlavu; Szaniszló; Szanisztás

The state registers add Sinislav, and one groom signed himself Sinislav Dionize.

Litean, and its Hungarian form Liptai#

13 distinct spellings in the parish registers, which reduce to these name forms:

Liptai, Litea, Litean, Litean Liptai, Litean Liptan, Liteanu, Lpitai

As literally written, most frequent first:

Litean; Litean(liptai); [Litean]; Litean (Liptai); Liteanu; Liptai(litean); Liptai; Liptai/Litean; Litea; Litean Liptai; Litean Liptan; Litean/Liptai; Litean/Lpitai

The state registers add Liptoi, Lityán, Lityan and Lityáu, and one printed slate has Liptat, which is a misreading rather than a spelling.

Tritean and Periat#

The state registers write Tritean as Trityán and Periat as Pereák and Pereát. Those are the productive forms for searching: Trityán is the query that produced the whole of Romulus Tritean’s career, and Pereák is why my first sweep missed my own great-great-grandmother.

On my mother’s side#

Conț appears as Conț, Cont, Conțiu, Conți, Koncz, Konczz, Concz, Kontz, Konț, Konc, and the given names double with it: Miklós is Nicolae is Neculae, János is Ioan, Vaszil and Vaszilika are Vasile. Antohi appears as Antohi, Antohe, Antohie, Antofie, Antoce, Antoci, and as Antochi in foreign-authored records only. Chiorean appears as Chiorean, Chioreanu, Chiorian, Kiorean, Kioran, Kiorán, Cioreanu, Chioranul, Cihărean, and as Tyiorean in Hungarian military records. Teorean and Teoreanu have to be swept separately, because a whole-word search on one does not reach the other. Do not confuse any of them with Cunțan, Conțiu or Antonie, which are separate surnames a letter away.

Families who married in, or whose records overlap#

67 further surnames appear in the same paternal records:

Anastasia, Antonia, Antonie, Birgován, Boldor, Bone, Bugnariu, Buta, Chimpean, Comșa, Demian, Dumbraian, Fogaras, Fogarasi, Hertia, Hetea, Illegible, Illyes, Inocan, Istrate, Kimpean, Kutiák, Kutián, Lopasán, Lopozan, Macbet, Magyarosi, Mareș, Mariș, Mateas, Mateasiu, Mates, Michael, Mih, Mihocsa, Mihócsa, Moyse, Neameș, Neamțiu, Negrea, Nemesiu, Nicusan, Onisim, Pariat, Percat, Periat, Periet, Perietu, Pestisior, Pop, Puscas, Puscasiu, Puscașu, Pușcaș, Pópá, Rosner, Szabo, Szanislav, Szente, Sălăgean, Tatar, Tritean, Truța, Tătar, Vitályos, Șerban, Șerbán

And on my mother’s side, from the Dipșa register: Bartoș, Pop, Popa, Pásc, Buzan, Jeican, Oltean, Preda, Someșan, Uilecan, Drăgan, Rusu, Bland, Socaci, Logigan.

Occupations#

The direct line runs Plugariu under Petru, Agronom under Ioan, Econom under Vichentie, so the household held land throughout. Several collateral branches slid into Ziler, day labour, which is the sharper social signal in these registers than any of the farming words. And the state registers show that two of those farming labels were hiding a second income: the same men the parish called Econom and Agronom in 1906 were a postal servant and a railway warehouse worker to the civil registrar, in the same year, at the same wedding.

All the data#

Seventy-three people on my father’s side, across the Uiorean, Litean, Tritean and Sanislav families, plus the maternal line at the end. Dates up to 1918 are Julian where they come from the parish books, as the parish recorded them, and are given unconverted; dates from the Hungarian state registers are Gregorian and are marked. Ages copied verbatim from the death register are the basis for every estimated birth date. The last column links to the underlying record on hpdt.ro so anything from that source can be checked.

The earliest Uioreans in the village#

The Periat generation, from the state register#

My three times great-grandparents#

That generation: Petru and Eva’s children, the Litean, Tritean and Sanislav sides, and the women who married in#

My great-grandparents’ generation#

The children born 1906 to 1923, and my grandmother#

My mother’s side#

Everything here comes from the Dipșa Orthodox parish register or the Hungarian state civil registers of the Dipșa district, except the two grave dates. There are no hpdt.ro records for any of them, because that database does not reach the county.

What I could not establish#

Stated plainly, so the gaps are not mistaken for conclusions.

• My paternal grandmother’s parents are unknown. Minerva Sanislav is not in any register I can reach, so unlike almost everyone else here she cannot be attached to a household. Two households in the village are possible and neither is provable. And since the Sanislavs came into the village from Veresmort, which is not transcribed and whose books I have not seen, her line runs straight out of the sources rather than merely stopping inside them.
• Petru’s parents are unknown. His 1843 marriage record names no parents and no birth record survives for him. The thirteen Uioreans in the first table are almost certainly his father, uncles and cousins, but the records do not say which. Iacov, born around 1783, and Mihail are the plausible candidates on age alone.
• My maternal grandmother’s father is unknown, and so is her mother’s maiden name. Both are on one line of one baptismal entry, on leaves 40 to 46 of a register that was catalogued and never scanned. Everything on that side of the family that is still open turns on those seven leaves.
• Whether Ana Antohi was born a Teoreanu. Family memory says so and names her brother; the grave says Antohi; her daughter’s maiden name is Chiorean. Nothing has joined the three up, and one question to my family would decide it faster than any archive.
• Whether the gendarme Martin Teoreanu is that brother. He is the right age and demonstrably tied to Transylvania, and nothing in any document about him mentions Ivești, a mayoralty, or Ana. It is a hypothesis with two facts behind it.
• Whether Toma and Georgie Tritean were brothers, which is the one fact that would fix how closely my family is related to bishop Lucian Triteanu. Toma’s death record names no father, and the parish marriage entries carry no parent fields at all, so the two households cannot be joined from these registers. If they were brothers, the bishop was my great-great-grandmother’s first cousin.
• Which Vichentie ran the station. The press names a Vicențiu Uioreanu as station master at Războieni from 1942 to 1945 and I cannot settle from it whether that is my great-grandfather, born 1880, or his eldest son, born 1907. On age the son is much more likely.
• What happened to him after April 1945. The purge communiqué is his last appearance, and I do not know whether the arrest order was carried out.
• My grandfather’s war service beyond the commission. The family account of demining and a wound is not documentable from any archive I can reach, because Romania published no named casualty lists in that war. Those records are in the military archives at Pitești.
• Where my grandfather was between December 1947 and 1951. The gazettes transfer him out of the village to Luduș and the press has him back in it by 1953, and the posting that brought him home is not in anything I have read.
• The parish spellings never reached print. Searches for Uiuorean, Uiărean and Ujuorean in the press return nothing, and so do the state registers’ own phonetic forms, Ujvoreán, Ujvorán, Ujvarán and Ujórán. Those forms existed only in a clerk’s hand, which is itself consistent with the surname argument: only the two public forms, Uiorean and Ujvári, are in the press.
• Both paternal surnames are also place names, which makes plain full-text search close to useless for them. Uiorean is the ordinary adjective for Ocna Mureș, and Sanislău is a commune in Satu Mare county.
• Nothing on the nineteenth century in the newspapers. Expected: ordinary Transylvanian village farmers did not appear in the press or the gazettes before about 1900.
• Nothing at all on Remus (b. 1909), Victoria (b. 1919) or Ană (b. 1923).
• Two separate paternal lines run into Veresmort, whose books I have not seen: Maria Periat was born there, and so were the Sanislav men. That parish, and its Greek Catholic books as much as its Orthodox ones, is the biggest single gap on my father’s side. The request can now quote Filon Periat, Ilie Sanislav and Angelina Crăcovan, and Gheorghe Sanislav and Dochia Mureșan rather than a surname, and it should go to Cluj as readily as to Alba, because Veresmort was in Turda-Arieș county.
• Coșma, in Mureș, is the equivalent gap on my mother’s side. Three generations of the Conț were born there, and Vasile Conț’s marriage to Ravna Popa and the births of Nicolae and David should all be in its registers, which are in the Mureș branch.
• No Conț marriage is reachable at all. The Dipșa Orthodox volume has no marriage protocol in it, and the sub-file catalogued as one carries no attachment. So neither my great-grandparents' wedding nor the generation above it can be read.
• Some records are duplicated in the source. Haralampie’s 1891 death appears twice, Iacov’s 1848 death twice, the 1814 Mih marriage twice. I have kept both ids in each case rather than picking one.
• One record contradicts the rest. Ioan’s 1912 death record calls him lutheran where every other record in his life has him orthodox. Most likely a slip of the pen.
• And one disagreement between two registers I cannot resolve. The parish makes the second Vichentie the son of Onisim Uiorean, which is what makes the two men cousins; the state act reads clearly Dénes, which this registrar glosses elsewhere as Dionisie. Onisim and Dionisie are not the same name. The mother matches in both, so the man is the same. The cousinship, which rests on the father, is now only probable.

If I were to carry on, the requests are short and specific and there are four of them. Leaves 40 to 46 of the Lechința Greek Catholic births, which name my maternal grandmother’s parents. The Aiud cemetery office, for the papers behind Ana Antohi’s reburial, which say which town holds her death entry. The Veresmort registers, asked for at Cluj as well as Alba, and under Vințul de Sus as well as Veresmorț, since the village had no communal secretariat of its own between the wars and was administered from there. And the Coșma registers in the Mureș branch, for the generation above Vasile Conț. Two further things would cost nothing and answer more than any of them: the American’s US naturalisation file, which will name his birth village and the family he left behind, and a couple of questions to my own relatives. I am not planning to.

If you are a relative#

If you found your own ancestors on this page, please get in touch.

On my father’s side that goes for anyone descended from the Uiorean, Uioreanu, Ujvári, Litean, Liptai, Tritean (Triteanu) or Sanislav (Sanislau, Lup) families of Feldioara Săcuiască, and equally for the families who married into them: Buta, Periat, Boldor, Demian, Tatar, Pușcaș, Nemesiu, Bugnariu, Popa, Costoiu, Istrate, Neamțiu, Comșa, Mareș, Șerban, Dumbraian, Magyarosi, Fogarasi, Hertia, Chimpean, Antonie, Hetea, Crăcovan and Mureșan.

On my mother’s side, for the Conț of Coșma, Dipșa and Aiud or Teiuș under any of their spellings, Conț, Cont, Conțiu, Koncz, Kontz and Konc; for the Chiorean of Lechința and its neighbours, and of Hordou, now Coșbuc; for the Antohi and Antohe; and for the Teorean and Teoreanu of Ivești in Galați and of Călărași. There I am short of most things, so anything at all would help. If you know of an Antohi half-brother or half-sister of an Elena Chiorean born at Lechința in 1923, you can settle in one sentence something four archives could not.

If you descend from the Triteans of Feldioara I would particularly like to hear from you, because one question there is open: whether Toma Tritean, born about 1828, and Georgie Tritean, born about 1839, the bishop’s father, were brothers.

I am not maintaining a family tree and I am not collecting anybody’s personal details. But I have working notes considerably fuller than this page, including the raw records and the act images, and I am glad to share them with someone who turns out to be family. Corrections are even more welcome than additions, and this page has needed several: it once had my maternal grandmother under the wrong surname, my father’s family coming onto the railway two decades late, and five sections of reasoning built on the name of a cemetery. Somebody’s grandmother almost certainly remembers something that would settle a question I have marked here as unresolved.