THE QUEST REALIZED:   THE AMAZING STORY OF HOW WE FOUND THE ELUSIVE KARDOS ANCESTORS.  God's help, a re-discovered cast-off photo of a man dead fifty-three years, simple townspeople in a village of 400 people halfway around the world, and an acquaintance made on the Internet between Fran and a woman a thousand miles away and twenty years her senior blazed the fascinating trail beyond the genealogical dead-end of Fran's own maiden-name line

© 1999 by Frances [Kardos] Mosconi. Updated March 28, 2001.  All rights reserved.

Thanks for your interest, as one of the visitors to this feature since August 1st, 2000

Here's the latest -- on September 22, 2000, Fran received an answer to a letter she had written -- a letter from "the old country", from a newly-found cousin from this line!  Even if you have visited this feature before, please click here to go and enjoy this story of victory in finding long-lost relatives after many years of searching

When Fran began working on the family tree, she read that it is important to gather any information available from living relatives.  During her childhood, she had been told the family was from the land Americans thought of in the 1960s as Czechoslovakia. Grandma Bertha, however, had been quick to clarify that the family was Slovak, not ethnically Czech.

The relatives had long said that the parents of Bertha's husband, Grandpa George Kardos, had been Paul Kardos, a Protestant, and Mary Simko, a Roman Catholic.  Paul, it was said, had died quite young after the family had come to the U.S., and been buried at another cemetery from the one in which Mary, his widow, would later lie.  After his death, she had their four children officially become Roman Catholics, though Paul never converted.  Mary went on to raise the children:  Paul and George, born in the old country, and Mary and John, born in Pennsylvania.  

Fran had recorded in her genealogy binder what she had been told about her father's aunt and uncles.  She referred to a letter her grandmother had written at her request in 1971 to help with a modest family tree assignment Fran had had to do in high school.  She asked her father and her aunts from this branch of the family what they recalled of the family. She learned to research what could be learned about these forbears from such records as the microfilmed U.S. Federal Censuses, obtaining data from the 1900, 1910 and 1920 rosters for Taylor, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania. Luck was with her in finding Paul's gravestone while passing through Taylor, at the cemetery to which an aunt had directed her.  

Armed with Paul Kardos "Senior" 's date of death, Fran was able, with the help of a researcher in Lackawanna County, to locate a copy of Paul's obituary, which told of his death in a coal mine cave-in.  This was news; the family had believed Paul to have been a police officer.  As he died while his son George, patriarch of our line, was but age 9, no one alive in the 1980s in our family could explain this discrepancy.  Could there have been a mistake?  

The researcher found, as well, some papers related to the naturalization of a Paul Kardos and a John Kardos, but they posed more questions than they answered.  Immigrants had been allowed to file the various phases of their applications to become citizens at any local court.  Perhaps a person's preliminary paperwork, the "declaration of intent" to become a citizen, would be submitted in one location. The "petition" might be filed in another nearby court, and the actual decree that one was a citizen, a process which could take five years in that era, might be granted at a third location. Sometimes, by the time those searching late in the twentieth century asked to see naturalization or other records from decades before, they had been lost in a fire, never kept as permanent records, or become impossible to locate.  The information asked for on naturalization applications from decade to decade varied; what the researcher found for Fran listed no local or old-country addresses.  Any relationship between John and Paul Kardos on these separate records could not be determined. Fran's aunts pondered this discovery; could this John have been one of "the cousins who settled in Canada", visited their family in Pennsylvania a couple of times, and was said to have moved back to Europe in the 1950s?  

No ship names were given on these naturalization documents.  The men gave different dates of entry into the U.S., and deducing Paul's age from his paperwork found by the researcher, it did not seem to match the age the family had believed him to be. However, the date of taking the oath of citizenship DID match that on a simple certificate Fran's aunt had had in family records, seeming to confirm that the record the researcher found indeed referred to him.

Fran began to research the deceased members of the Kardos branch.  Comparing information found in microfilmed Selective Service Registration records for World War I,  Fran found her great-Uncle John Kardos' birth date. . . and discovered that he had been born to Mary Simko Kardos a few days after the census taker visited the Kardos household in 1900, on a date just a few weeks after his father's death in the mine!

Relatives from several states gathered for the wedding of Fran's sister Mary to Rick Harrington in 1987, a few months after Grandma Bertha Belensky Kardos' death.  Grandma's husband George had died in 1973.  At her parents' home after the wedding, Fran asked her Kardos-side aunts and uncles what they might recall about the origin of the Kardos branch.  Fran had never seen any photos or documents on Paul and Mary Kardos.  Mary had died during Fran's father's youth; he did not speak much about his grandmother.  Fran's aunts and uncles said they, too, recalled little being said about the family or homeland. They believed their father George Kardos, son of Paul and Mary, and grandfather of Fran, to have been born in what is now eastern Slovakia in late February of 1890, and to have come to Pennsylvania with his parents about age 4.  It seemed to them that the Kardos family's ancestral town might have been Michalovce, Sobrance or Ungvar (the latter now known as Uzhgorod, and falling with the Ukraine border).  Perhaps they had been Methodists, some believed.  

[left: immigrant-generation Slovak-Americans George Kardos and Barbara "Bertha" Belensky each came to Pennsylvania as children with their families. They married in 1916.]

Fran was new at researching records which reflected the changing national borders and the various governments which had ruled this area from the time of Great-grandfather Paul's birth to the present. What was she to make of her own father's birth certificate from Pennsylvania which stated that George was from Austria?  What of acquaintances' saying Kardos was a Hungarian or even a Greek name?  

She learned that what is now the Slovak Republic had, in the past, been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at various times considered part of Austria or Hungary by civil authorities both there and in other parts of the world.  (The confusion felt by U.S. residents about where the borders lay in eastern Europe and the national identity of their immigrant neighbors was noted by Fran with a chuckle as she found that Pennsylvanian census takers had listed the newcomers as being from "Slovakland".) ( Click here to view the names of some excellent books that can help you find out more about Slovak-Americans.)

Fran learned to use the LDS microfilms of old country records which can be of great help to family tree seekers.  But how was she to trace the Kardoses before their emigration to the U.S., as she had with the family of her father's mother, being unsure of which town to look under?  Some town names have changed over the years. . . the family might not have lived within an established village, or had perhaps lived in one village but worshipped in another. . many records of that era for that part of the world are in Hungarian, some in Latin, others in Cyrillic. . . 

Fran's father's branch had spelled their name Kardos; he told her that his uncle and cousins, however, had gone by Karadice and Kardice; Fran missed the family entirely on one census until she recognized that the enumerator had recorded it as Cardis!  Her family pronounced the name "Kar'-dose"; she learned that the old-country pronunciation is more like "Kur' - dawsh". 

By the time she began to search, George and his three siblings had all died, and the family had not kept in touch with the survivors of the siblings. Where could more information be found?  She set out on the old-country path of her search in 1996, deciding to scan her way through the LDS records of the various Protestant churches in the above-mentioned towns for the era of George's birth, hoping to happen upon the family surname, upon a George Kardos born about the correct time and place, and work from there. After two years of intermittently proceeding this way, she had found few Kardoses on eastern Slovak records, and no one matching what she knew of her own family. She went on to pursue other branches of her husband Jim's and her genealogy, hoping someday to think of a new approach, to find some clue. 

NEXT:  CLUES BEGIN TO APPEAR...