Purpose. The Excel spreadsheet linked below is part of my ongoing effort to enumerate the German Hungarians living in St. Louis in the twentieth century—and, equally important, to show the relationships between them. Each person listed on the spreadsheet is immediately related to at least one other person on the sheet, either as a spouse, a child, a parent, or a sibling.
The spreadsheet therefore represents the ways in which German Hungarians living in St. Louis became knitted together. Often these relationships were already in place upon arrival. But the community also knitted itself after arrival, through marriages solemnized in St. Louis, frequently between people from different Hungarian villages. These immediate familial relationships gave coherence to a community that started with the first migrations in the early twentieth century, that grew with the arrival of expelled German Hungarians following World War II, and that ended with the deaths of St. Louis’s last German Hungarians in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Contents. To be clear, the spread sheet, which is still in progress, enumerates members of an expatriate community, not their forebears in Hungary or their descendants in St. Louis. While it contains elements of genealogy, it is not traditional genealogy, which emphasizes transgenerational relationships—that is, ancestry and lines of descent within a given family. Instead, the spreadsheet emphasizes the intragenerational relationships, especially marital and sibling relationships, that bound families together into an interrelated community.
The spreadsheet lists only speakers of German who:
(a) were born in Hungary,
(b) lived in St. Louis, and
(c) were immediately related (as spouse, parent, child, or sibling) to another German Hungarian living in St. Louis.
There are two exceptions:
(a) The spreadsheet includes St. Louis-born German Hungarians, provided that they either traveled back to Hungary before reentering the country or married a German Hungarian immigrant living in St. Louis.
(b) It also includes spouses who were not German Hungarian; their names are preceded by an asterisk (*).
Sources. The sources of data in the spreadsheet are too numerous to annotate. They include ships’ manifests, obituaries, cemetery records, birth certificates, marriage certificates, death certificates, census records, Familienbücher—the list goes on. Anyone wishing to know the evidentiary basis of any particular data point should email me.
Method. Data have been assembled by researching the immediate familial relations of a given member of the community. This research leads to the discovery of additional community members, who are in turn researched. The names of community members who have not yet been researched are highlighted in yellow.
The method, of course, is inherently biased towards identifying community members who are immediately connected to other Donauschwaben. It will not lead to the identification of St. Louis Donauschwaben who have no such connection.
Organization. Community members are listed alphabetically. Within each entry, parents, children, and siblings are also listed alphabetically. Spouses, however, are listed in chronological order.
Future developments. The downloadable spreadsheet linked below will be updated as corrections are made and new data are added. I hope that the accrual of data will eventually enable us to investigate key questions about the development of St. Louis’s German Hungarian community. When did it start? When was it the largest? What forces held it together? What accounts for its demise?
Click on the link below to download the Excel spreadsheet.
Immigrant Identities in St. Louis, 1903-1935 