Meanwhile, there is news and talk of Vienna and Budapest, here:
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Happy trails to you!

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When I first got back from months away, the corner behind the food storage area was an especially vile toilet-land, but it’s OK now. At the time though, evidence suggested something way bigger than lizards were in residence.

Neighbours reported that gangs of thugster squirrels were tromping all over my roof, for those months, constantly in and out of the roof and loft space.
For European and North American friends, a squirrel here is not a tiny cute thing. It is four or five times any version of cuteness, and they have big vicious front teeth. Mr Landlord hates them, calls them destructive.

The photo here is not exactly our type, but close.

It’s true that they are vandals. They don’t eat steal and eat a whole piece of fruit, for example, which is the usual. They take one chunk out of each piece of fruit on a tree, and leave it there, mangled and molested.

(Oddly, peacocks eat this way too – they even trample things without eating anything. Just vandalism.)

I trust Mr L’s judgement. He’s an expert. These things act like aggressive bullies, trampling with a sound like horses across the roof. I wouldn’t want those nasty front teeth angry at me.
Oh, I hoped they didn’t oust the peaceful, mosquito-eating, singing tokay lizards!
The Thugster Squirrel Gang, on my return to now-contested turf, may not have wanted to share the place with me. They thundered over the roof, harshly, for a few days, but then it went peaceful.

And tidy.

And lo and behold, there appeared a tokay, my latest lizard housemate.

There has been a ceasefire. I hope there has also been a long-range peace treaty.

I will be watching this space, to be sure.

Photo credit
By JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16627476

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The 20th is a big local event. Masses of shiny blue satin swamped her room, bags of it piled high. She sighed, “Sleep – no sleep, only little. After 20th, OK.”

The event in question is next weekend, one of their “Big Buddha” days that are only a few per year. It’s Wan Awk Phansa, or Day of Leaving Phansa. Phansa is Thai for Vassa, an annual 3-month retreat for monks (Theravadan branch).

It’s also called The Water Retreat because it’s during soggy monsoon season (about July to September), when you may as well stay in and pray for three months. Monks disappear into deeply disciplined days, and devoted types give up smoking, eating meat, alcohol or other goodies. Some people call it Buddhist Lent.

The Day of Leaving Phansa is when the monks finally emerge. There will be parades, boat races and gifts. People will make a happy, welcome-back fuss, unlike the going-in ceremony which is a quieter affair.

Saturday there was a rehearsal for the dancing procession. Our little village pier isn’t usually so busy, with at most half a dozen small boats, a handful of people with fishing poles plus some strollers and gossipers. Here was a much larger crowd than usual, nearly 100 people, chattering and excited.

A pickup truck arrived with a loudspeaker, blaring out music for “ram wong” style dancing, traditional, graceful yet animated folk dances. The dancers stretched the whole length of the pier, doing delicate steps with classic arm movements, one hand as a lotus opening, the other closing, fluid as water. Leaders were there to demonstrate the moves, but most people clearly have done this for years.

Next Sunday morning, this dancing procession will go from one end of the village to the other, and then to the temple. The dancers will be in matching costumes, many made by tired, diligent, kindly Teo.

Traditions vary across the regions. There is buffalo racing, a special parade where everyone dresses as angels, and communal foot-washing of the monks is another way to pay respect. Everywhere there are gifts and almsgiving.

The Fireball Festival in Nong Khai is the most unusual. At this time of year, the Mekong unexplainably explodes with so-called fireballs that leap spectacularly into the sky. Myth says that Nagas – partly human, partly serpentine water creatures – chuck these fireballs up there to pay respect to the Buddha. Science says this time of year provide conditions where underground methane gas floats to the surface and burns up in the air. Either way, huge crowds gather every year.

Many places do night-time illuminated boat processions, and these are truly beautiful, I can tell you.

Here down south, they’ll do a daytime parade through the main port town (from police station down the one main street, to their main pier).

This is with the big “boat floats”, meaning excellent, detailed reconstructions of their most beautiful ancient boats from history, mounted on trucks to drive along the parade route, all decorated with gorgeous people in gorgeous traditional costumes. There are also floral floats constructed like giant mythical creatures.

I hope it doesn’t rain, but in fact it probably will.

All the boat and water symbolism is to do with washing away unneeded negative emotions.

Just wash it away, and turn over a new leaf, that’s the spirit.

Meanwhile, on Monday night on our little village pier, the music-blaring truck was back with no crowd but a few teenagers dancing for fun.

Tuesday through Thursday, Boy Racer was the theme. Two teams practiced for the boat races. They all matched their shirts to the boat colour, team brown and team sky blue, 6-8 boys to each boat.

The pier was absolutely crawling with little and large boys – on the deck, below amongst the barnacles, and leaping wildly into the water.
Motorbike engines and testosterone were revving everywhere.

It’s sweet this happens during low season. Beachy tourism is good business, but has a price. Their village is swamped with visitors. Many locals disappear from the beach and the pier, during those months.

Here, today, it’s their village again. They can emerge, like monks from retreat.

I wish I could have helped Teo with the costumes.

I’ll wait a week and let her catch her breath.

May all impatience wash downstream.

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the blog continues where people actually see and read it, which is this:
https://www.facebook.com/Noodle-Trails-Eileen-Kay-1560532710838005/.

That’s why I discontinued doubling up everything on this page.

best wishes and happy trails to you.

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Eugene Kardos’s bar, Bronx New York, about 1910

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By the 1940 US census, the three boys were gone from this house. Eugene was 55, Anna 50. There was a big X next to Anna’s name to designate she was the only one providing this information. Interestingly, she got his birth year wrong, but only by a year. That, his emigration date, and other facts about his origins have varied over the years, all over these forms. This time they were married age 23 and 18, and that story has shifted about too.

According to her report, he was still a married white male Hungarian, living at 338 West 182^nd street, Bronx, New York City. They’d been there at least 5 years. They confirmed it was not a farm. It’s hard to think there may have been farms in the Bronx, even back in those days.

It was not owned but rented at $38 per month, it says. Ten years ago they said they were paying $80. Did they downsize that much, or is this an error? Let’s not say it’s accidental fudging, let alone fibbing. Let’s not say that. Let’s assume they used to have a much bigger place when all the boys were at home, and now they were low-budget and cosy. I’m sure all their taxes were just fine too. 

His occupation was still Assistant Manager in the insurance industry, in which he worked 42 hours just last week, and 52 weeks that year. (Really?). His annual salary was $3120, and he had no other income. Not even at the race track. Honest.  

We’re also told she completed the 8^th grade, and he had four years of college. I feel I need to add the word allegedly, and can only apologise for this impulse.

He was not a vet, and did no military service, neither in WW1 nor WW2 but he was registered. This was the fourth decade he was asked to declare these facts.

Yes, he had a social security number.

And the boys? Where were they in 1940?

Albert was 32, had been married to Frances Levine for seven years by then, had one baby and another on the way. He still worked at the rubber factory which was part of the war effort, and deemed a protected job, so that’s where he spent WW2.

Eddie started the 1940s age 28, renting an apartment in the Bronx for his wife, 24, and the one year old baby.

It’s said he had one year of college. Due to a heart problem, he never went overseas during the war, but did some sort of local policing duty, at home in New York.

Grandad’s fists were often clenched in photos, by the way.

Alex was married in 1942, age 26. Mom was 21. It was right before the US Army shipped him off to war.

He came back as an Army Captain with a Bronze Star medal for bravery, with an unwillingness to talk about whatever he witnessed.

Here’s where I reassure all living relatives that they will not be mentioned, in any of this material. This is about ancestors only.  More to follow, in a later instalment

I posted this earlier than expected, because I am getting ready to go to Budapest, Hungary, to research this family further. I have a few transit days ahead of me. See you on the other side.

For more bite-sized daily Noodle Trails, snippets, Budapest in March, and chit-chat, click here:

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 A lovely discovery: I found a few Kardos kids today. Not real ones. Ancestors.

When Grandad Eugene sailed away from Europe about 1905, about age twenty, I imagined a little gang of family young’uns, admiringly seeing him off. His oldest sister Roza’s kids were Margit, Karoly (Carl or Charles in English) and Paula. Uncle Miksa’s kids were Klara and Margit (their Luiza died at age two).

Yesterday, I was delighted to find two more.

Finding them in the records (if I haven’t made a mistake) is not just good for the story. It’s good for my sentimental hope to someday find living relatives. But, that unlikely event to one side, here are the new missing pieces to our saga.

Eugene’s sister Lujza (which I think is pronounced Luiza) had two kids, Karoly and Olga. There’s more.

Second oldest of her seven siblings, Lujza married a guy named Jakab Neufeld. He seemed to disappear from the records after 1918, and he wasn’t buried with everyone else in Budapest, so I wonder if maybe he died in WW1.

Around that time, the residential records I saw listed all the women in the family and none of the men. It feels like just about everyone was conscripted. Hungary sent a higher proportion of soldiers to that war than most other nations involved, and lost them in the same high proportions. Jeno/Eugene escaped all that, in New York.

He had to register with the US military, although he never served. He had to declare allegiance by becoming a naturalised US citizen in 1914, along with wife Anna. By then they’d been away about ten years. This is when and why they lost their Hungarian citizenship.

He and his counterparts back home would not have fought on the same front, I do not think. But their nations were at war. 

Before all that, his sister Lujza married Jakab in 1893, a wedding Jeno may have attended, since he was then age nine. I want to picture hium scowling in an itchy suit, pinched in the cheek by aunties and squirming.

Lujza delivered her son Karoly within a year, and daughter Olga the year after. They’d have been in their early twenties when they lost their dad.

I haven’t found dad Jakab’s grave. Lujza’s buried with the rest of the clan, together with someone who turned out to be her second husband, Kalman Klein. I had no idea she had a second husband. Good for her. What’s more, they both lived nice long lives, nearly to 1940, died a year apart, and are buried together in one tomb, near at least a dozen of their people.

So, the three discoveries in one day were Lujza’s two offspring and a second husband. There are points it’s hard to keep this all straight.

If Lujza is Grandad Eugene’s sister, then she’s my great aunt. Her kids Olga and Karoly, are my cousins, once removed.

If Olga and Karoly lived nice long lives too, the ends of their lives could have overlapped with the start of mine. They could have been somewhere in Budapest, when I visited as a college student. At that point, they’d have been in their 80s, if they were still around. That’s a poignant thought. I wanted to search for them and others, but it wasn’t possible at the time.

Budapest 1977, Budapest 2017

Still, in the late 1970s, on a long college break, I trekked all over Budapest for a few weeks, eating strudel (“retesh”) and goulash, going to museums and concerts, meeting some very friendly art teachers who took me to wonderful folk music dancing clubs, and the whole time I had a sadness saying to me, “I know I have cousins here. I know it. I could be sitting right next to them on a bus, and I’ll never know.”

It’s possible I’ll feel the same way, when I go back, this coming March.

However, if I’m going to imagine youngsters of the past, saying goodbye to Jeno as he embarked to become American Eugene instead, now I can add Olga and Karoly to this mental image.

Here’s the snapshot:

Klara and Margit (Spitzer)were 17 and 15.

Margit the younger, Karoly and Paula (Stark)were 14, 13, and 11.  

Karoly the younger and Olga were 11 and 10.

That’s a sweet imaginary photo. I’m fairly sure there is no such real photo, which is perhaps why it’s all the sweeter. 

Did any of these people have offspring? I haven’t found any yet. That’s another question for the Budapest trip, where I will have a lot of help.

Research continues. 

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I’ve always heard that Grandad Eugene didn’t talk much. He never said much about life back in Hungary. He never mentioned any siblings. So when I recently learned he came from seven siblings (four sisters and three brothers in that order), I was stunned.

They were Roza, Lujza, Berta, Fredrika (or Frida), Markus (or Mark) , Reszo (who turned into Rudolf for a while), and Jeno who I want to spell Yeno because that’s how they say it.

Now I’ve just had more news, from genealogist Nick Gombash, with a nice bit of symmetry. Jeno’s mom Sarolta Kardos not only had seven kids. She also came from seven siblings, where she was oldest.

They were Sara, Armin, Markus (or Miksa), Luiza, Jonas, Eduard (or Ede) and Fanni.

They spanned seventeen years, and her own kids spanned fourteen.

When Big Sister Sarolta married Lipot Kohn (later-Kardos) age 18, in 1869, her youngest sister Fanni would have been two years old. Littlest Sister Fanni may have been a playmate of Sarolta’s first child Roza, technically her niece, born a year later.

Roza would later marry Arnold Stark (born Klein). Their three kids would have known her brother Jeno as a very young uncle. Margit-Mindell was about six years younger, Karoly (Charles, who would later change his surname to Sigheli) was about seven years younger. Paula / Chayele was about ten years younger.

There were cousins closer to his age, on Jeno’s mother’s side, the Spitzers. His Uncle Miksa and Aunt Svidonia had two girls. Cousin Margit was six years younger, and Klara was four years younger, born in 1888, the same year Jeno was told his surname was not Kohn but Kardos, and that he wasn’t Jewish after all, even though he was.

I do wonder how they explained that to all these kids.

So this little gang of his contemporaries – Mindell, Karoly, Paula, Klara, and Margit – I wonder if they waved farewell when he took the train to the ship, to leave for a new life. If he was about twenty, and they ranged from ten to sixteen, were they there as admiring fans? I would have been. I’d have been suffering the pain of hero worship, accentuated by the December cold, and I’d be secretly dreaming my own teenage dreams of trains and ships.

Then it was 1905. Jeno’s brother Rezso had already sailed in the summer, and was waiting to be joined in New York. Reszo didn’t stay. The vast majority of this clan were born, lived, stayed and died in Budapest, and possibly never left the city limits. They are all buried in one place.

Jeno was the only one who sailed away, for good.

LINKS

Very helpful Hungarian Genealogy facebook group

More about Nick Gombash and Hungarian Family Searches

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