An Empty Place in the Tree

In every family tree, names emerge slowly—sometimes through patience, sometimes through luck. There are certificates, parish registers, photographs, family memories, old documents forgotten in folders. But there are also empty places in the tree. And some gaps are not mere administrative absences, but old wounds, passed down silently from one generation to the next.

For me, my paternal grandfather was such an empty place. My father was born in Budapest on 16 June 1917, the son of Maria Fola. In the records of the time, no father is mentioned. Only the mother’s name remained, and behind it a question that no one ever answered. I have placed Maria’s story, as far as I was able to reconstruct it, in the separate page My Grandmother Maria.

Grandmother Maria never told me this story and, as far as I know, she told it to no one else. Perhaps she did not want to. Perhaps she could not. Perhaps, after living through a war, a return to Transylvania, a move to Bucharest, and a lifetime of work and silence, she no longer knew how to tell it. In families, such things are hidden not only out of shame, but also out of an instinct for survival. What is not said seems, for a while, easier to bear.

More than a century later, the question came back to me by other paths: through DNA, through registers, through fragments of family trees, through correspondence with military archives, and through a damaged photograph received from an American relative discovered through genetic genealogy. Among all the names that appeared in this search, one began to emerge more clearly. In this public version I shall call him only Mihály K.

I still cannot declare: this was my grandfather. I can only write: as of today, he is the most plausible candidate. And for an absence that has lasted so long, even a well-founded hypothesis acquires the weight of an encounter.

The Village with Two Names

Mihály K. was born in the summer of 1896 in a village in the Spiš region, in the north of the old Kingdom of Hungary, today in Slovakia. In the parish register, his first name appears in its Hungarian form, Mihály, natural for the administration and documents of the time. In the Slovak language of his family and village, he was probably Michal. Later, after emigration, he would use an Americanized form of his name.

This change of name was not an exception. It was the very condition of people born in the borderlands of the empire: at home they bore one name, in registers another, in the army another, and across the ocean yet another. The name did not disappear; it adapted. What to us, looking back, seems like genealogical confusion was, for them, the natural way of crossing languages, authorities, and borders.

His village was not without history. The church, the manor house, the memory of an older world, and the roads descending toward the larger settlements of Spiš gave the place an antiquity that children probably felt without being able to name it. For Mihály, however, childhood must have been less history than daily discipline: household work, animals, firewood, fields, school, church, and a house in which there were many children.

It was a Slovak world in language and customs, but Hungarian in administration. Slovak was probably spoken at home; in registers, school, the army, and official papers, Hungarian linguistic forms appeared. This explains why the man I have identified appears in one language as Mihály, in another as Michal, and later under an Americanized name.

His Mother’s House

His mother was Maria Katherina K., a woman whose family name has special importance for my research. My DNA matches were leading me toward several related families and names around the same area of Spiš. For a long time, these were only fragments, scattered signals across Slovak territory. Then, in the family tree of Mihály K., I found his mother, whose origin connected him to the very cluster that had drawn my attention.

Before the children born into her marriage with the K. family, Maria Katherina had already had a son, Stephanus, while she was still very young. He bore his mother’s name, which says a great deal in the registers of that period. He had probably been born outside a recognized marriage, what people in the village would have called a child born out of wedlock.

This detail proves nothing about Mihály, but it creates a disturbing resonance. My grandmother Maria, too, had been born without a father recorded in the documents. She, too, carried through life the burden of an assumed name, of an unclear origin, of an unspoken question. In that world, legitimacy, name, and silence were not abstract notions, but forces that determined a person’s place in the village, in the family, and in his or her own conscience.

Mihály therefore grew up in a rural household with several children, where every pair of hands mattered and childhood ended early. We should not imagine a sentimental childhood, but a harsh one, ordered by work, parish school, religious holidays, family rules, and the need to survive.

Mihály’s Childhood

We do not know what Mihály’s childhood was like. We can only reconstruct it cautiously from the world into which he was born. A boy from a Slovak village in the Kingdom of Hungary probably attended the local elementary school, learned to read, write, and count, and then entered more and more into the work of the household. School gave him literacy and the language of authority; family gave him the discipline of work.

He must have grown up between the Slovak spoken at home and the Hungarian imposed by administration. Perhaps he learned early that the world did not call him by the same name everywhere. To his own people he was Michal. In the registers he was Mihály. In America he would use yet another form. In such a life, identity does not suddenly change; it adapts to the person who writes it down.

In the village, America was not yet his country, but it was probably already a word in circulation. From Spiš and the surrounding villages people were leaving across the ocean, toward mines, factories, working-class neighborhoods, and cities whose names were difficult to pronounce. Some sent money. Others sent photographs. Others never came back. For a child like Mihály, America may first have been a story told by adults, then a possibility, and later a destiny.

But before America came the war.

War Reaches the Village

When the war broke out in the summer of 1914, Mihály was eighteen. It was the age at which a boy might have been expected to think about work, marriage, household, or leaving for the wider world. Instead, Europe placed a uniform before him.

We do not know whether he was called up in the very first months of the war. It is possible that he remained in the village for a while, waiting for his enlistment order. It is possible that he was included later, as losses at the front required new contingents. But in 1916, at the age of twenty, Mihály already belonged to the generation that the Austro-Hungarian monarchy was inevitably drawing into war.

In villages, war was not first of all a political strategy, but an absence. Boys gone, women left with the household, letters awaited, news read with fear, names mentioned in church. A village felt war not through maps, but through empty places at the table.

If Mihály was an Austro-Hungarian soldier, his path could have passed through many places: training centers, railway stations, hospitals, transit units, fronts, brief leaves. For a young man from Spiš, Budapest was one of the great gates of the empire. We still do not know whether military documents will place him there. But precisely this possibility has made his name unexpectedly important to me.

Budapest, 1916

Budapest in 1916 was not only the elegant city of boulevards, cafés, and shop windows. It was also a militarized, already tired city, weighed down by shortages and uncertainty. Soldiers passed through the capital on their way to the front or returned wounded. Some were on leave. Others were in training, in hospitals, or waiting for new orders.

In that same city lived my grandmother Maria. She had recently come from Solovăstru and probably worked as a servant in a well-to-do household in the very center of Budapest. For her, Budapest meant work, obedience, service staircases, unfamiliar rooms, free Sundays, and a few hours in which she could cease to be only the lonely girl from Transylvania.

I imagine this possible encounter without artificial romantic scenery. There was no need for a grand ball or a scene from a novel. In a city full of soldiers and servant girls, of young people from all the provinces of the empire, an encounter could take place on a Sunday, in a park, on a busy street, in a modest dance hall, or near a house where girls in service stepped out for a few hours from the order of their masters.

The two of them, if they met, could have spoken Hungarian. She, a Romanian from Transylvania, carrying the name Fola like a suit of armor. He, a Slovak from Spiš, entered in the Hungarian registers of the empire. Two young people far from their villages, in a city that, in the midst of war, made everything more urgent. People did not know whether they would still have time.

We do not know whether it was love. We do not know whether they saw each other once or more than once. We do not know whether he was passing through, on leave, convalescing, or in a period of training. We do not know whether he told her his true name, the Hungarian name from the documents, or only a first name. And we do not know whether he ever learned that Maria had become pregnant.

If Mihály was that young man, then their meeting should not be imagined as a long story, but as a brief, intense, and seemingly impossible intimacy. War broke ties before they could take shape. A departure order, a changed unit, a wound, the end of a leave could separate two people before there was a future between them expressed in words.

In June 1917, Maria gave birth in Budapest to a boy, József. My father.

After the War: Another Path

After the war, the man whom I call here Mihály K. followed a path that can be documented more clearly. He married a woman from his region, had children, and later emigrated across the ocean. In the United States he entered the world of Central European immigrants, industrial labor, and neighborhoods where Slovaks, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, and others from the old monarchy rebuilt their lives in another language.

In America, the European past did not disappear, but it was covered over by other documents, other names, other addresses. He had a family, children, and an American life. He died in the 1960s, far from the village where he had been born and from Budapest, where he may have entered, at least for a brief time, my grandmother’s life.

If that encounter existed, we do not know what remained of it in his memory. Perhaps nothing, a memory similar to many others. In any case, a memory that left no visible trace in his later life. Perhaps a silence. Perhaps he never even knew that a child had been born in Budapest. Perhaps Maria had no way of looking for him. Perhaps war, distance, and convention closed the story before it could be spoken clearly between the protagonists.

Clues, Doubts, and Caution

Genealogy is sometimes a science of documents. At other times, especially when documents are missing, it becomes an art of probabilities. In the case of Mihály K., I do not yet have the decisive proof. But I do have several threads that converge.

I have a DNA cluster leading me toward the Spiš region and toward a group of related family names. I have discovered that Mihály’s mother belonged to that same genealogical environment. His age was suitable for a possible romantic encounter in 1916. Then there was the Austro-Hungarian military context. I had Budapest as the place of my father’s birth. I had the silence of my grandmother Maria. I had the name of a family and the damaged photograph of a man who, seen after more than a century, leaves me anything but indifferent.

Photographs do not prove kinship. I know that. A resemblance can deceive, and the desire to find a face can make memory too generous. Yet when I looked at the photograph of the possible candidate and then at the photographs of my father, I could not remain detached. There is something in the shape of the face, in the gaze, in the expression, that does not contradict the hypothesis. It does not prove it, but it makes it more alive.

The images below are kept as visual support for a genealogical hypothesis. They are not documentary evidence and are not intended to publicly identify a living family, but to illustrate a personal search that remains open. In the first photograph, the handwritten signature has been masked.

Perhaps that is why this search is no longer, for me, merely a genealogical investigation. It is an attempt to restore a name to an empty place. To give a face to a silence. To understand not only who my father’s father was, but also what story lay hidden behind a birth with no father recorded in the documents.

Waiting for an Answer

This is the possible story of a young man from the Spiš region who may have reached Budapest in 1916. It is also the story of a young woman from Solovăstru—my grandmother Maria—who gave birth there to a child and then carried on with her life without explaining, perhaps without being able to explain, who the father had been.

I have written to the archives. The reply from Vienna reminded me that, after the dissolution of the monarchy, many military records belonging to men whose right of domicile lay outside present-day Austria remained in the successor states. The search then led me to other military archives, where Mihály’s file might still survive. Now I wait.

If a military file is found, and if it places Mihály in Budapest in the autumn of 1916, the hypothesis will become much stronger. It may still fall short of absolute certainty, but it would be an essential piece of evidence. A single dry line in a military register could confirm what DNA, geography, and intuition have already begun to suggest.

Until then, this page is not a verdict. It is an act of waiting.

In recent months, the investigation has taken another step forward. Through genetic genealogy I have come into contact with descendants of the Hripko and Kaczvinszky families of Spišský Štiavnik, people who have generously placed family trees, documents, and photographs at my disposal. For the first time, the man who had previously been only a name in a parish register has also acquired a face. It is not yet the proof I seek, but it is another piece in a puzzle that began more than a century ago.

I still do not know whether Mihály K. was my grandfather.

But among all the shadows encountered in this investigation, he is the first to have a first name, a place, a family, a historical context, and a face. Each new document, each photograph, and each reply received from an archive or from the descendants of those families narrows the field of possibilities and brings me, little by little, closer to the answer I have sought for so long.

Perhaps one day the decisive document will appear: a military file, a leave pass, a unit record, or some other archival trace placing Mihály in Budapest in the autumn of 1916. Or perhaps no such document will ever be found.

But even then, this search will not have been in vain. It has restored to me the story of my grandmother Maria, brought to light the lives of people about whom the family no longer knew anything, and rebuilt, after more than a century, lost ties of kinship between Transylvania, Slovakia, and America.

And if one day I am able to say with certainty who my grandfather was, I will know that the answer did not come from a single document, but from the patience to gather hundreds of fragments of memory until, at last, they began to tell the same story.