Death (and Love) in the Time of Cholera in 19th Century Hungary

While I was conducting research for a client in the Greek Catholic church records from Kis Dobra in present day Slovakia (formerly the Hungarian Kingdom), I stumbled upon the documentation of a cholera outbreak in the village.

It started in the beginning of 1873, with just several cases of death from cholera. By summer, practically all death records listed “cholera” as the cause of death.

The disease seems to have affected all ages equally, from babies to middle-aged and older people. Oftentimes, they were relatives, which is to be expected with an infectious disease. Here, two men of 34 y.o. and a 26 y.o. and a 3 y.o. girl from the same family became victims of the cholera outbreak. How devastating it must have been for the family!

The mortality rate was very high, considering that in a small community of less than a thousand people 2-3 people were dying every day for about a year. This is the total population, accounting the members of the Kis Dobra Greek Catholic parish from several neighboring villages, and not the amount of infected people.

According to the Wikipedia page on seven recorded cholera pandemics worldwide, two were severe in Hungary: within the second (1829–1837) and the fourth (1863–1875) pandemics. In Hungary specifically, cholera first appeared in 1831, and is estimated to result in about 100,000 deaths. The next pandemic was in 1872-1874, taking away 30,000 lives. Some Hungarian sources provide significantly higher estimates.

If this were not enough, literally at the same time, there were multiple cases of deaths caused by typhus.

Meanwhile, life went on in Kis Dobra. Children were born and couples got married. There are records of a death and a marriage that took place in the same family, just two months apart. A 73 y.o. man from the village called Bély dies of cholera in August 1873. A young man from the same house, probably his son or a grandson, gets married in October the same year. This was rather unusual to have a wedding in a mourning family so little time apart. But who knows what the circumstances were? A shotgun wedding? Another drama?

Why is this relevant? Details like these add dimension to a genealogy research. Reading historical records carefully is what creates a story, beyond just basic birth-marriage-death facts. As genealogists we can benefit from digging into every little detail from a record to get details about the life of people we are researching.

What else? Although this was an absolutely accidental find, it came in the time when a pandemic is causing a major panic and anxiety around the world. To me this is a reminder that pandemics have always been part of human history. Our ancestors have been dealing with a multitude of devastating diseases, on top of already relatively short (by modern standards) lifespans. We are the lucky descendants of survivors. However sad the story is, this is a pacifying thought about human resilience.