If you’ve been reading SummerSalt for a while, you might remember the story of the two brothers and the vixen, Maria. The two brothers lived in a village in Hungary named Veszprem. One brother is my great-great grandfather, Anton, and the other was Josef. Josef was getting married, and in those days it was common for the brother of the soon-to-be-groom to bring back the fiancé to the village, so off goes Anton to retrieve the bride for the arranged marriage of his brother Josef. However, player that my great-grandfather was, he and Maria fell in love on the return trip. So, if you fall in love with your brother’s bride and totally betray your family in screwing up an arranged marriage, this leads to a rather awkward situation of explaining. As such, Anton and Maria decided to skip out on that process, and instead boarded a train without tickets. Of course when the ticket collector came by, they had nothing to turn over, and so instead Anton did the obvious thing, he pushed his true love off the moving train and jumped out after her. P.S., when I told this story to my campers up in Philly, the only question they repeatedly asked was “Were they hurt?” So, I don’t know the answer to that. However, if they were, it clearly did not mess up either of their reproductive organs, or I wouldn’t be here. So Maria and her love rolled to a stop (unhurt or in pain, unknown), in France. They had absolutely no money, so they got a job cleaning hotels, all the while saving up their earnings to come to America. Which they did, and this is why I’m here.
The way we pieced together this whole story is, Anton’s brother Josef had one son very late in life (he was kept for some years as a POW), and that son’s wife gave birth to my cousin Zsolt. He still lives in Veszprem, and he contacted my grandfather here in America, and we compiled this whole little drama-drenched novel of my family.
So, all this time, we had automatically assumed that my grandmother’s side of the family is purebred Italian (I’m half Italian), and that my grandfather’s side was Hungarian.
We were wrong. Through Facebook (such a marvelous thing), we were contacted by a guy in Canada. My last name is not common in any country, not even Hungary where it supposedly came from. Even Hungarians would tell us the country of origin of the name wasn’t Hungary.
This Canadian dude contacts my father (Italian), and sends him a message saying that his father-in-law just died, and his surname was the same as mine. He found hardly any of the name around the globe, but a lot of us in North Carolina. He had done some genealogy research about the family, and this is what he told us:
200 years ago, my family came from Italy to Hungary to build Zirc Cathedral, and they settled there. Crazy enough, the cathedral is in the village where my cousin Zsolt lives. The fact that my family was church builders is a bit ironic, seeing as I’ve already mentioned in a previous article that I am not religious in the least. In the 1956 revolution, Canada took in 35,000 Hungarians, and the Canadian’s father-in-law was the only with my surname.
So, as it turns out, my name isn’t actually Hungarian as we had believed all this time, and the way my family came to America (at least on my grandfather’s side), is worthy of a romance novel. Now I feel as if with a name like that, I have quite a lot to live up to.
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