[Heidi Smith]

Hi Rhonda, how do you find a hospital record? I don’t know which hospital he would have been born in. Is there a way to find this info?

Thanks!
Heidi

[Heidi Smith]

I don’t know that he was baptized. My grandfather was jewish and my grandmother was catholic though I believe that neither of them were practicing any religion. How could I find out?

[Heidi Smith]

Hi Rhonda,

Btw, I think Rhonda is a beautiful name :). Yes, my first attempt was through the Konzuli in D.C. during my first citizenship appointment. I filled out the application and all the other forms and brought them with me that day. I also made a ton of mistakes! At the time my uncle (the only surviving member of my dad’s immediate family), couldn’t remember how his birth last name was spelled. We have all been Loewys since they emmigrated in ’56. Neither my dad nor my uncle ever even knew their paternal grandparents’ names. They were 7 and 9 years, respectively, in ’56. My dad’s dad passed 10 years before I was born. Through a ton of online genealogy research and the help of a stranger at a family search center, I found out that my great grandparents were Lővy Markus and Strasszman Hermina.

I have provided my parents marriage certificate, my dad’s death certificate (printed without the names of his parents…), my grandparents’ death certificates, my birth cert., and my marriage cert. I’ve also sent them photos of all of the documents I have found online that have anything to do with their journey from Budapest to the states with their misspelled hungarian names on them. I’m not sure if the absence of my dad’s birth certificate is a deal breaker or not, but I am sending in an new request form with all of the newest information that I have. Hopefully that is all that is needed.

We’ve already done the biometrics, had my signature recorded, and I have already paid the passport fee. They had me do this during that first appointment. I was kind of surprised, but I just went with it. Eszter said it would take about a year. That was in April.

[Heidi Smith]

I am Heidi Smith. My dad, my uncle, and my grandparents were living in Budapest not far from 60 Andrássy út. They fled during the 1956 revolution with no documentation or anything else. They were sent to Connecticut and ultimately settled in California, where I was born.

Both of my grandparents passed on too early, and I only had my grandmother until I was 13. I wasn’t raised with much Hungarian cultural influence or language, or at least nothing that was labeled as such. Now my own children are 16 and 18 years old, and we are exploring our Hungarian heritage and trying to make up what sometimes feels like lost time. I want to learn it all, experience it all, and hopefully take in enough to feel like my seeming foreign heritage is actually a part of me. I’m looking forward to the expó and meeting more people!

[Author]

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