Digital Genealogy

This paper demonstrates how methods of digital genealogy can be used to trace personal histories in innovative ways to uncover potentially significant details of settlement history where information in historical sources is scarce. It uses the example of a mid-18th century Roman Catholic settler and his family in Szentes, a small town on the Great Hungarian Plain, at a time when mass migration into this region was happening from overpopulated regions of the Kingdom of Hungary. Records of the settlement history of the town are meagre at best, but this important aspect of social history can be supplemented through meticulous research into the Family Search genealogy database.