Into the Unknown

September 2015, we traveled to a small Serbian town to find our family

There are many obstacles to doing genealogy research abroad. I remember the day my husband and I nervously stood at the side entry of the Catholic church in Sombor, Serbia. It was a large, weather worn, wooden door. The concierge at our small hotel said she knew a woman who sometimes helped foreigners with their genealogical research and would try to contact her. In the meantime, we came to the Catholic church because we knew great great grandpa Jozics was a Catholic and we hoped they might have some records that would lead us to his father and mother.

Neither my husband nor I spoke Serbian, but I had lived in Slovenia for a bit over a year and learned some Slovene, which for a native speaker was generally mutually intelligible with serbian and croatian. However, I had not spoken Slovene in twenty years and I had a very hard time understanding any of the other south slavic languages, so I hoped it wouldn't come to that!

"Do you think they heard us?" My husband asked, and raised his hand to knock again. I motioned for him to wait. Not long after, a thin, middle aged woman, modestly dressed opened the door. She stepped aside and let us in, asking in Serbian how she could help us - that much I understood. The language barrier came up quickly. She asked what languages we speak.

"English?"

​ "Še kaj." >>Still something<< she said motioning for more with her hand.

​ "Spanish?"

​ "Še kaj."

​ I took a deep breath. "Slovene?"

​ "Dobar!" she clapped her hands, proclaiming with confidence she would understand me.

Of course, I was thinking, "But I won't understand you!" I explained that we were looking for a baptism record from the early 1800s for my husband's great great grandfather. She took us into a room just off the hall and opened up a filing cabinet full of church books. She explained that she didn't have records going back that far and we'd have to inquire at the government building because they collected all local records past a certain date. I had no idea what she was talking about, so she grabbed my husbands shirt, which was green, and said we should go to the green building at the center of the city. Then it clicked.

​ City hall wasn't even open that day, and we were only staying overnight. Fortunately, our concierge had reached her researcher friend. We met that night. She was a slightly older woman, well groomed with excellent English skills. We gave her the name and rough birthdate for the person we wanted to find. She told us to meet her the next morning at the town archive, not city hall. Before she left she told us how odd she found it that we were in our thirties and doing this research. She usually expected to work with much older people.

​ The next morning we met at the archive, and that is when the magic happened. The archivist, Anastazia, a jovial, blond ethnic Hungarian, showed us to a large book she had already pulled out. She pointed to an entry, the birth record for Laurentius Jozich, our ancestor. Yes, I did change the spelling from above intentionally, because the different priests spelled it phonetically according to their language: German, Hungarian or Croatian. Anastazia then pulled up three other names in the matter of fifteen minutes. She could read the 200 year old writing like it was old hat, and corrected our misinterpretation of dates. She completely set us at ease with her mirth and her amazing English skills. We had hit the jackpot.

​ Crossing the border from Hungary into Serbia I had my doubts about how the trip would go. The houses looked a bit worse for wear, the border agents were surly, and even though it had been twenty years, I feared that Kosovo may still be fresh on the mind of some Serb who would want a pound of American flesh in exchange for the bombing.

​ In the end, we couldn't have wished for a better trip. Not every archivist will speak perfect English, not every concierge will know a genealogist and not every native will welcome you with open arms. We know there are costs to be born when traveling abroad to do research on family lines and those costs can prevent the work from ever happening. However, we also know, now more than ever, that there are resources available to help overcome all of the obstacles, and our commitment at the Garden Refuge is to find as many tools and resources possible to help everybody find their family names.

By Araxie Jensen