Southern Slovakia has been home to a large Hungarian-speaking community for centuries, and families there often turn up in Hungarian records, Slovak archives and sometimes Hungarian National Archives microfilms. The same village may appear under a Hungarian and a Slovak name, and a person may be recorded as Hungarian in one census and Slovak in the next. This guide explains the records, the history from 1938 to 1948 and the traps to avoid. We checked these details in October 2026, and archive holdings, statistics and online collections change, so confirm them before you rely on them.
Who and where
According to the 2021 Slovak census, 456,154 people, or 8.37 percent of the population, declared themselves Hungarian, and 462,175 gave Hungarian as their mother tongue. Hungarians in Slovakia are concentrated mostly in the south, near the border with Hungary, and form the majority in two districts, Komárno and Dunajská Streda. Village pages on Wikipedia show how some villages have Hungarian majorities. See our Slovakia guide.
Records you will meet
- Church registers. Many Hungarian speakers were Roman Catholic, Reformed or Lutheran, and registers are in Latin and Hungarian. FamilySearch’s Slovak collection covers all three denominations. See our Slovak records guide.
- Civil registers. Civil registration began on 1 October 1895, and records to about 1920 were written in Hungarian.
- Duplicates in Budapest. The microfilm collection of the National Archives of Hungary holds duplicates of parish registers created before 1895, and some copies from historical Hungary, including Upper Hungary, can be found there, according to a Hungarian research guide.
- Hungarian online collections. Hungaricana is a public collection of 4 million pages of digitized publications, according to one researcher’s resource list.
Language help
Hungarian is unrelated to most European languages and only remotely related to Finnish and Estonian, so a word list is essential. FamilySearch provides a Hungarian genealogical word list, and Hungarian was used with Latin and German in the records of all areas of the old Kingdom of Hungary before 1918. See our guide to reading the records.
Place names
Villages in southern Slovakia often have both a Hungarian and a Slovak name, and some, like Horné Mýto, whose population is 85.19 percent Hungarian according to its Wikipedia page, remain strongly Hungarian. The 1877 Gazetteer of Hungary, the Lelkes dictionary of Hungarian place names and the cross-border Hungarian place name dictionary help you convert between them. See how to find the village of origin.
History that shaped the families
- 1938. The First Vienna Award of 2 November 1938 returned the southern territory of Slovakia to Hungary, and the Hungarian army occupied it between 5 and 10 November.
- 1945. Czechoslovak administration returned. Presidential decree No. 33 revoked the citizenship of Germans and Hungarians, except those with an active anti-fascist past.
- After the war. According to the Slovak National Archives, 41,666 Hungarians were deported from southern Slovakia to the Czech lands.
- 1946 to 1948. An agreement on population exchange between Czechoslovakia and Hungary was signed on 27 February 1946, and some 80,000 Hungarians were moved to Hungary. Czechoslovak citizenship was returned to Hungarians in 1948.
These events mean that some families were moved, split or recorded under changed names and nationalities. Ask whether your family’s story includes a move after 1945.
Census declarations
The census figures for Košice show how declarations changed: in 1910, 75.43 percent of its inhabitants declared Hungarian nationality, in 1920 21.2 percent claimed Hungarian ethnicity, and in 1930 16.4 percent. After the Second World War there was also a state-organized change of ethnic identity known as re-Slovakization. Treat declared ethnicity as a clue about the declaration, not as fixed fact. See our guide to censuses.
A research routine
- Identify the village in its Hungarian and Slovak forms.
- Find the denomination and the parish.
- Search FamilySearch’s Slovak church books and the state archive’s holdings.
- Use the civil registers from 1895, written in Hungarian until about 1920.
- Check Budapest for duplicates if a register is missing.
- Ask about moves after 1945, and check Hungarian records if the family went to Hungary.
Illustrative composite (not a real family): A reader’s family were Reformed Hungarian speakers from a village near Komárno. The Reformed registers are in FamilySearch’s Slovak collection, written in Hungarian, and the village has both a Hungarian and a Slovak name in the gazetteer. Family stories say a branch was moved to Hungary after the war, so she checks Hungarian sources for that branch.
Names across languages
A published list of equivalent given names in Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovak, Russian and Yiddish helps you recognize a Hungarian given name as the same as a Slovak or Latin one. Record the form in the register and note the equivalent you use in your tree.
Questions to ask your family
- Which language did the family speak at home and in church?
- Was a branch moved after 1945, and where did they go?
- Is the village known by both a Hungarian and a Slovak name?
- Which church did the family belong to?
- Do any papers survive in Hungarian?
Common mistakes
- Searching only the Slovak village name. Older records use Hungarian names.
- Reading a declared nationality as fixed. It changed over time.
- Skipping Hungarian sources. Duplicates and moved branches may be there.
- Assuming Latin throughout. Civil records are in Hungarian.
- Ignoring the 1945 to 1948 moves. They split families.
Continue with our regions guide and our Slovak records guide, and browse Regions, Borders & Emigration. Sources include the Federal Union of European Nationalities on Upper Hungary, the Slovak Nation’s Memory Institute on the population exchange, a Slovak research strategies guide on the Kingdom of Hungary, Wikipedia on deportations of Hungarians to the Czech lands and a Hungarian genealogy resource list.
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