Great-grandmother Mary Pohl

It happened again. This time Zsuzsanna Jácint contacted me with information about my ancestors. She lives in Hungary and it turns out we are distant cousins. My great-grandmother Mary (Bittner) Pohl (1867-1944) is the younger sister of her great great-grandmother, Julianna (Bittner) Szeidl (~1857-1916).

Zsuzsi even provided an image of the elusive marriage record of Mary to Albert Pohl, for which I’ve searched a long time. She provided Mary’s birth record too. There’s no doubt now about the parents of both Mary and Albert.

Great-grandmother Mária “Mary” (Bittner) Pohl was born and baptized January 27, 1867 near Pécs, Hungary. (She emigrated to America in 1893.) Her parents were István “Stephan” Bittner and Mária Turek. Not much is known about Stephan Bittner and his ancestors. Zsuzsi thinks the family lived for a time in Serbia. Her great great-grandmother Julianna (Bittner) Szeidl was probably born in Majdanpek, Serbia.

Mária Turek and her ancestors came from Szomolnok, which was part of Hungary at that time, but is now known as Smolník, Slovakia.¹²  Zsuzsi provided the names, and dates of birth and marriage for these ancestors. With this help I was able to verify these easily with images of actual records.

There is a discrepancy with the surname Bittner. Zsuzsi thinks the name is actually Pittner, which agrees with what my aunt Letha Alexander thought it was. However a preponderance of the birth and marriage records over several years indicates “Bittner” while a few records do show “Pittner.” It is possible the names could be used interchangeably, but I’ve chosen to use “Bittner” until more compelling evidence is found.

Albert Pohl was born in Setzdorf, in what was then Austrian Silesia. Today it is known as Vápenná, in the Czech Republic.³ Albert’s parents were Albert Pohl and Sophia Rohr. They accompanied their son to Szabolcs and Albert senior died there in 1896 well after Albert junior had emigrated to America.

Thanks to cousin Zsuzsi, this is a wealth of information that extends my maternal family line. I now know of my great great-grandmother, Mária Turek (1827-1898), and back at least to the names of some of my fifth great-grandparents from the mid-eighteenth century: Gáspár and Anna Mária Turek, Ádám and Erzsébet Sztraka, János György and Marianna Kremniczky, and Frigyes and Dorottya Topschak.  See more details starting with the Albert and Mary Pohl family group sheet.

This discovery is all the more fitting just before the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of my mother, Ruth (Stewart) Voisin. I know she too would be thrilled to learn of them.

Footnotes

1. Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem, Eötvös Loránd University, Department of Cartography and Geoinformatics (http://lazarus.elte.hu/ : downloaded 18 January 2017), Third Military Mapping Survey of Austria-Hungary (Map Index: http://lazarus.elte.hu/hun/digkonyv/topo/3felmeres.htm; St. Pölten: http://lazarus.elte.hu/hun/digkonyv/topo/200e/33-48.jpg), n.d.
2. Slovencina: Obec Smolník okres Gelnica, rok 1998.
   https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Smolnik10Slovakia1.jpg
3. Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem, Eötvös Loránd University, Department of Cartography and Geoinformatics (http://lazarus.elte.hu/ : downloaded 18 January 2017), Third Military Mapping Survey of Austria-Hungary (Map Index: http://lazarus.elte.hu/hun/digkonyv/topo/3felmeres.htm; Leutschau: http://lazarus.elte.hu/hun/digkonyv/topo/200e/35-50.jpg), 1914.
4. http://www.vapenna.cz/index.php?id=uvod.php