All four of my husband’s grandparents were born in Hungary.

Recently my husband ordered a DNA kit from ancestry.com. When the kit arrived, he spit into the kit’s tube until his spit reached the indicated line and mailed it back to Ancestry. This week he received his results, and I was thrilled!

I made the map below based on Ancestry’s map of his genetic communities as well as other maps showing what Hungary looked like in the 1800’s. Near the center of the map, we see a rough outline of what Hungary looks like today. When his grandparents were born, Hungary was three times bigger than it is today so I’ve made an outline to show the size of the country that they knew and loved.

Places, where there is DNA similar to that of my husband, are shown in pink. The three red dots indicate the known locations of my husband’s grandparents’ births. The town names are in big bold red letters even though they were all little villages or small towns. Gyoma used to be in the center of Hungary. Now it is very close to the Romanian border. Zádorfalva is barely in the country while Szürte is barely outside. I didn’t indicate it on the map but my husband’s father was born in a little village southeast of Gyoma. It was part of Hungary when he was born but part of Romania now.

This map is not necessarily about where my husband’s grandparents were born, however. This map also shows where some of THEIR ancestors lived hundreds of years ago. Even though TWO of his grandparents were born in Gyoma, the map seems to indicate that their ancestors moved to Gyoma from someplace else. Also, if my husband’s brother took a DNA test, his map would look a little different because a child receives only half of each parent’s DNA, and the half received can vary from child to child.

My husband’s paternal grandfather, István Sallai, was born in Gyoma, as were his parents and grandparents for several generations. Our research goes back to the 1770’s where all of his ancestors were either born in Gyoma or else they moved to Gyoma from Túrkeve, a town 34.8 km to the north. Sallai means “from Salla”, but we are not certain where Salla might have been. Maps give many possibilities. Also, Frank Kery is one of my husband’s second cousins through this line, and he made the list of potential 2nd and 3rd cousins that the DNA test gave. That helps confirm our faith in the accuracy of the test.

István’s wife, Mária Finta, was also born in Gyoma, as were many generations of her family on her father’s side. Her 2nd great-grandfather, Mihály Finta moved to Gyoma from Túrkéve where MANY people with the surname Finta have lived over the years. On the other hand, Mária’s mother was of Slovak ancestry and was born in Szarvas which is 24.4 km to the west of Gyoma. The Lutheran Church in Szarvas kept wonderful records so I was able to find most of her ancestors back to the mid 1700’s. Sometime around or soon after 1720, her Slovak ancestors moved to Szarvas from whatever Slovak town in which they used to reside.

My husband’s maternal grandfather was born in Szürte, Ung county, Hungary which is now part of Ukraine. We do not have access to any records in the area so other than the names of his parents and possibly some siblings, we know very little about his family. This map and ancestry.com’s DNA database will likely match and introduce us to cousins my husband never knew he had.

Zádorfalva is located where most of the pink is concentrated on the map. My husband’s maternal grandmother, Erzsébet Lenkey was born in Zádorfalva. Both of her parents were born to noble families so we have the names of many of her ancestors back as far as the 1200’s for some lines who also lived there. Zádorfalva is still in Hungary near the Slovakian border. The other towns of her ancestry are close-by in what used to be Gömör county, Hungary. Now those towns are on one side or the other of the Hungary-Slovakian border. The Hungarian names for these towns include Alsószuha, Mihályfalva, Horka, and Kövecses. The noble families of these small towns tended to stay in town generation after generation, leaving only if they married into another noble family and relocated to that family’s town. It makes perfect sense to us that this part of the map has the greatest concentration of pink.

I am certain that if you took a DNA test, you would delight in the information given, too! You might also enjoy reading Ancestry.com’s research about DNA and western migration in North America.

Since this is my 862nd post, I’ll now write a little bit about the number 862:

I learned from OEIS.org that the sum of the factors of 862 is not only a perfect square but also a perfect fourth power:

1 + 2 + 431 + 862 = 1296 = 36² = 6⁴.

• 862 is a composite number.
• Prime factorization: 862 = 2 × 431
• The exponents in the prime factorization are 1 and 1. Adding one to each and multiplying we get (1 + 1)(1 + 1) = 2 × 2 = 4. Therefore 862 has exactly 4 factors.
• Factors of 862: 1, 2, 431, 862
• Factor pairs: 862 = 1 × 862 or 2 × 431
• 862 has no square factors that allow its square root to be simplified. √862 ≈ 29.3598