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From: "Laszlo & Monika APATHY, III" <>
Subject: [HUNGARY-L] [Fwd: [HunRoots] FAMILY TREE Ltd. Budapest]
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 16:51:14 -0400


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GRRRRRREAT article.......... Enjoy!! :-)
KITUNO cikk......... Elvezd!! :-)

============================================================
* Laszlo B. APATHY, III & Monika R.(mn:WIEBELT) APATHY
* AAA - "Apati/Apathy Ancestral Association" (Osok Tarsasaga)(1995)
* (de/von NagyTot & Voldorf/Dombos, Transylvania, Hungary, Nov.1609) &
* WWWW / W4 - "Wiebelt-Wetzel-Weibel-Wood" Families of Rhine-Pfalz,
Germany
* 191 Selma Ave., Englewood, FLorida 34223-3830 USA

* Tel:941-474-4774 Pager:941-742-4215 FAX:941-475-9187 or 497-6129
* EMail: ICQ#:12869055
* URL address:
http://www.members.home.net/laszloapathy/apathyfamily.htm

* "Genealogy & Family History is our hobby..., We collect (deceased)
ancestors".
* "It is so VERY sad to lose a culture and it's language".
* Researchers say, "Insanity is hereditary, you get it from your
children" :-)))
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Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 20:53:00 +0200
From: Family Tree <>
Organization: Family Tree Ltd. - Csaladfa Kft.
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Subject: [HunRoots] FAMILY TREE Ltd. Budapest
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Dear Friends and Colleagues:

Following is an article which appeared recently in the Budapest Business

Journal about Family Tree. I thought you'd be interested in reading
about the current state of the genealogy business is in Hungary.

Best regards,

George Eotvos

Beyond the books
>From village tours to exhumation, Family Tree provides more than
genealogy research
by Agnes Csonka and Bela Fincziczki
BBJ, 19.7.1999

Gyorgy Eotvos left the timber industry in search of trees of a very
different kind.
The 37-year-old entrepreneur and his partners thought they could carve
out a
niche in the local genealogy business by also providing travel and other

services that anyone investigating the family history might want.
Little did they know that the "other services" portion would include
videotaping an ancestor's exhumation, locating a lost, living relative
or
arranging a tour to find a grandparent's tombstone in a weed-covered
cemetery in Ukraine.
Family Tree sprouted from personal curiosity. "My grandfather told me
that
we come from the famous Eotvos family," Eotvos said. "Of course, it
turned
out after five minutes of research that we have nothing to do with them.

Still, I got stuck at the archives."
While genealogy is now all the rage in the United States, in Hungary
only a
handful of researchers and a few tiny ventures are active in this field.

Eotvos' Family Tree Genealogical and Probate Research Kft had its
breakthrough in 1994, when marketing via an English-language Web site
allowed it to reach Americans of Hungarian descent.
"By now, we've reached the point where, if someone wants to do this,
he'll
sooner or later end up at us," Eotvos says.
Eotvos founded the company in 1990 together with lawyer Jozsef Kiss, now

the
company's research director. "For quite a while, it was only the two of
us,"
Eotvos said. "We had Ft 20,000 [$325], and we were lent a computer so
slow
that if you switched it on, went to have breakfast and came back, it was

still warming up. Then came the demand."
Nine years later, the company has a staff of nine, draws some 300 family

trees a year, owns a computerized office in Buda with company cars, an
award-winning Web site, and its own mailing list. Thanks to its Web site

(at
"http://www.familytree.hu";), it receives
about 25 e-mails a day from potential clients. Its revenue last year
topped
$100,000.
"There's a lot of interest and plenty of inquiries, but out of that,
only
about 10% become actual commissions," said Anita Gy. Monori, the
company's
executive director.
Family Tree's first clients were tourists who couldn't finish their
private
research while visiting Budapest. Before the Internet, a few
strategically
placed brochures at embassies, the Szechenyi Library and the National
Archives provided enough business to get by.
About 90% of clients are second, third or fourth generation Hungarians
from
the U.S. Since most cases lead outside Hungary's current borders, the
company offers to research all the territory of the former Kingdom of
Hungary - including Hungary and parts of Slovakia, Austria, Romania,
Croatia, Slovenia, Yugoslavia and Ukraine.
The basic package Family Tree delivers to clients is five to 15 pages of

family history put into a geographical and historical context,
photocopies
of documents, pictures or video footage of forebears' tombs, the village

or
town where they once lived and the house where they once dwelled. That
starts at about Ft 100,000, but the price has gone as high as Ft 830,000

to
arrange a recent tour. "The limit can be the starry sky," Eotvos said.
Even after that spending, however, not everyone is pleased when they
discover their pedigree varies from the family legend.
"Generally, people don't like it," Eotvos said. "It's understandable -
one
may have lived his whole life thinking that he comes from a noble
family,
and then it turns out that there's nothing. That's tough, especially for

those who consider that important."
Tombstones to exhumation
Family Tree did not start out with a plan of providing services beyond
lineage research.
"Clients wrote us whether we could do this or that, and we said, 'well,
that's not a bad idea,' " Monori said.
That has led the company to trace missing persons, track Jewish
genealogy
and nobility certificates, investigate inheritance cases, and even
search
out and repair family tombstones.
"We did an exhumation, too," Eotvos said. "By the time we'd found the
grave
of the client's grandfather, who died in 1920, it turned out that the
cemetery was being wiped out. So we had to exhume the bacsi really
quick,
and we had to film the whole process, too."
Family Tree's full service and marketing efforts has its critics among
traditionalists. Sandor Arisztid Harmath, a 77-year-old retired
archivist,
lawyer and musician, runs Budapest-based Hungarogens Family Tree
Research Bt
out of his flat on Jozsef korut. Harmath considers Family Tree's
approach
closer to show biz than genealogy.
"They go for the visuals, but that's not the real gist," he said. "They
work
with an American-type, business garnish, for which there is a demand,
but
that's not what real genealogy is about."
Harmath, who started genealogy as a hobby at the age of 18, said he and
his
four researchers also get extra requests from clients such as taking
pictures of ancestral residences or graves, or hiring a painter to do
the
family coat of arms. Hungarogens now has one or two clients a month,
and
charges about Ft 60,000 to Ft 80,000 for research. Tracing family roots
normally takes one or two months, but Harmath said one dogged client has

been looking for his ancestors for about 20 years now.
Branching into tourism
Family Tree is comfortable with its less purist approach, and it is
planning
to focus on expanding two of its most popular services: tours and
probate
research.
Family Tree started organizing what it calls "Roots Tours" - trips to
ancestors' birthplace or tomb - two years ago.
"Genealogy as a hobby is really popular now in the U.S.," Monori said.
"We
get lots of inquiries about how they could visit the places their
families
comes from, so we help them with everything."
The company's nine employees arrange everything from airport transfers
to
hotel reservations to transportation and guides for historical tourists
both
inside Hungary and beyond. Ancestors who once lived on the territory of
the
former Kingdom of Hungary can be traced back to the early 1700s, using
sources including church registries, state birth registers, marriage and

death certificates, archives, libraries, obituaries, census results and
even
newspapers of the time.
For added thrill, Family Tree even will take clients along to the actual

local archives.
"I was very lucky in finding the gravestones of family members in
Berehi,"
tour participant Betty Rosen said in an e-mail posted on the company
site.
"I never expected to find anything and was therefore ecstatic!"
Organizers say they have to bring just as much zeal to organizing trips
to
locations generally left out of the guidebooks.
"When you're in the Ukraine for the fourth day, struggling through an
old
Jewish cemetery overgrown with weeds and trying to find a gravestone for

the
old lady with you, you have to be enjoying what you're doing," Eotvos
said.
"It doesn't work any other way."
New competitors coming
Meanwhile, the rising vogue of family tree research is even attracting
companies of a rather different profile.
Csilla Biro of Burial Services Bureau ventured into genealogy a few
years
ago, adding to services that include scattering ashes of the deceased
from a
plane, flower deliveries to graves, body delivery and full burial
services.
"As a student, I had a cleaner's job at the [National] Archives. Dusting

the
books, I imagined there may be people interested in the history of their

families," she said. Biro declined to say how many commissions she has
received for family research, but said her clients are mostly Hungarians

living in Israel.
The company undertakes tracing ancestry for Ft 70,000 to Ft 84,000, a
tariff
Biro said is likely to rise in line with swelling costs.
Eotvos is unfazed by potential competitors. He says that setting up a
company that could rival Family Tree's services would require a
long-term
investment of about Ft 18 million, which not many would risk
"There are always people who start doing this, since this is a fun
thing to
do," he said. "But this is an investment that yields returns very
slowly.
You have to train the people working with you. Most historians, however,

are
not likely to have that much to invest into such a venture."
________________________

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