Genealogy Chat

Hi all Need to trace Kovatsch in Austria anyone have any advice, much appreciated. Maureen

This might prove to be a bit tricky! The House of Habsburg used to rule a large chunk of Central Europe, amongst other places. Each territory they ruled was technically separate (a bit like England and Scotland under the Stuarts), and would have its own records. Part of their realm was the Archduchy of Austria, which is part of the present-day Republic of Austria. By extension, the whole of their empire was often referred to as Austria by outsiders, a bit like how foreigners today will say 'England' when they're talking about the UK as a whole. So 'Austria' could mean Austria proper, but it could just as easily mean one of several other places. Hold onto your hat, because it gets much worse! In terms of geographical extent the largest Habsburg territory was the Kingdom of Hungary, which was about three times bigger than the present-day republic of that name. 'Kovatsch' definitely sounds Hungarian to me; if so, it's probably spelled 'Kovács' in Hungarian. Some googling found plenty of examples of it as a Hungarian personal name, but if it is/was a town, it didn't show up. But... By the time of the First World War, the Habsburg's empire was known as Austria-Hungary. They were on the losing side, and their empire disintegrated, including the old Kingdom of Hungary. One large chunk of the kingdom (Transylvania) became part of Romania. Another chunk eventually became Slovakia. Another chunk became part of southern Poland. Another has ended up today as part of the Ukraine, while yet another is today part of Serbia. And finally modern-day Slovenia and Croatia were formerly part of the old kingdom. So 'Kovatsch' could be in any of those countries, and so, presumably, could the records. Unfortunately, boundary changes will have also meant name changes, so to find out where it is today could be a bit of a challenge...! Finally, to really make life difficult, older maps often give a German name rather than the local name, and the two can sometimes be very different; for example, 'Bratislava' was 'Pressburg' in German. I've tried going through some old maps to see if I can find this place, and it's been a bit of a job, but I think it might be a small town or village called Kovarce, in western Slovakia. The nearest town of any size in the area seems to be Topoľčany, if you're interested in looking it up on a map. I've been trying to find some old Hungarian maps that would probably have helped confirm that Kovarce is the place you want, but it looks like they were amongst files I lost when my old PC blew up (!) a couple of months ago. Incidentally, the letter 'c' in Slovak is pronounced 'ts', and the Hungarian 'cs' is pronounced like our 'ch'. Sorry to give you a very long response which doesn't actually answer the question you asked, but hopefully you can see why I've had to explain all this!

Looks like this site's stupid software can't cope with that Slovak town name, so try this spelling without the diacritics: Topolcany.

Maureen - Am I misreading the question ? Kovatsch is a place name or a family name ?? and you do not state WHEN.