Genealogy

This page is a record of what I have been able to establish about my family, mostly from surviving parish registers and old newspapers. Most of it is my father’s line, the Uioreans of Feldioara Săcuiască, which goes back four generations from my grandfather to a man born around 1820. My grandmother’s family, the Sanislavs, were living in the same village and had come into it from the next one, and they are here too, as are the Liteans and the Triteans on my great-grandmother’s side. My mother’s side, the Conț and the Antohi, has its own section near the end, and it is much shorter.

I am writing it down for one reason: so it exists somewhere durable and searchable. I have no plans for it beyond that. It is not a project, I am not building a family tree application, and I will probably not maintain this page. If it is wrong in places, and some of it certainly is, it is wrong in public where a relative can correct it, which is better than being wrong in a folder on my laptop.

The families come first, then the twentieth century, then my mother’s side, then the archives and the method. The full lists of spellings, occupations, newspaper citations and records are at the foot of the page.

What this page covers#

Both sides, very unevenly. My father’s side runs back four generations to about 1820. My mother’s side amounts to three dates from a gravestone and a handful of gazette entries, and I have given it its own section rather than leaving a visible gap or padding it out with guesswork.

The imbalance is not about the families. What made the paternal side possible was one parish being transcribed and put online by a university project, and that happy accident does not extend to my mother’s people at all: the database covers neither of the towns they lived in nor the county they came from. So the two halves of this page are built from different kinds of source, and the maternal one is a gravestone, a census of 1761, some official gazettes and a surname argument.

Even within my father’s side the coverage is lopsided. His father’s line reaches 1820. His mother’s line, the Sanislavs, barely starts: I cannot yet name her parents.

Nothing here is more recent than fifty years#

That is deliberate, and it is the one rule I have applied throughout.

Every person named on this page was born between 1763 and 1923, and every reference to a named person stops in 1974. A few citations are later than that, and they are all about a place rather than a person: a 1983 article explaining why the railway station carries the neighbouring village’s name, and two from the 2000s still puzzling over the same thing. I have living relatives, and so does everyone else descended from these families, and none of them asked to be catalogued on a stranger’s website. Public archives happily surface names of people who are alive, or recently dead, along with their addresses, their jobs, and occasionally their court appearances. Fifty years is a blunt line but it is an easy one to hold, and it keeps this page firmly in the realm of history rather than anybody’s private life.

The rule bites hardest on my mother’s side, which is the most recent material I have and the part where the living outnumber the dead. My mother and my uncle are alive and are not on this page. Neither are their cousins, several of whom I know only as forenames from a conversation. Neither is my grandmother’s death date, which falls a few years the wrong side of the line, nor one gazette entry from the 1980s that names a living man’s parents. A good deal of what I have found about that side is therefore missing here on purpose, and it is the part where the gap between this page and my notes is widest.

I do hold that later material, including several items about my own grandparents from the late 1970s and 1980s. It stays there.

Where the family is from#

One village, for the whole span of these records: Feldioara Săcuiască, Hungarian Székelyföldvár, today Războieni-Cetate in Alba county. In the older records it sits in Torda-Aranyos county; the birth records from 1921 onward spell the full chain as “Feldioara, Vințul de Sus, Turda Arieș, Transilvania, România”.

The Turda local paper Aranyosvidék obligingly used all three names in one breath when it reported a large fire there on 26 July 1930: “a vármegyénkben Făldioara Războieni Székelyföldvár községben”.

Other places that come up:

The station has a different name from the village, and it is the neighbour’s#

Worth its own note, because it is the single most useful search fact in the whole exercise.

The railway junction at my family’s village was not called Feldioara or Székelyföldvár. It was called Székelykocsárd, in Romanian Cucerdea Secuiască, after the neighbouring commune, and it kept that name until it was renamed Războieni after 1918. Új Élet of 25 March 1983 spells it out: the junction everyone knows as Székelykocsárd is actually Székelyföldvár’s station, and the halt before it is the one that belongs to Székelykocsárd, today Lunca Mureșului. Hungarian speakers still call the junction Székelykocsárd, and Krónika and Hargita Népe were still writing puzzled articles about the mismatch in 2004 and 2010.

So the pre-1918 and post-1918 names of the same platform share no word at all, and anyone searching for this family on the railway before 1919 has to search Székelykocsárd, not Székelyföldvár. It also means three different Cucerdeas have to be kept apart: the junction station, which is mine; the village of Cucerdea Săcuiască, now Lunca Mureșului; and Cucerdea Română in Mureș county, a different place entirely.

How to read the diagrams#

There are two of them, one for each side of my family, and they use the same conventions. The point of drawing them this way is that the gaps and the guesses are the interesting part, so they are on the picture rather than hidden in the prose.

• Solid box, solid line. Documented in a parish register, an official gazette or on a gravestone. I can point at the record.
• Dotted box. A person I can name but not document, or cannot name at all. The label says which.
• Dotted line. A connection I believe but cannot prove. Every one is labelled with what it rests on: family memory, unproven, or hypothesis.
• Purple box. A named candidate, on age and place, with nothing tying them to the family.
• Dotted line with an arrow runs parent to child. Dotted line without one means the two are somehow connected but not by descent, so a suspected brother or cousin hangs off the side rather than sitting above anybody.

Neither diagram reaches me. Both stop at my grandparents, because the generation below them is alive and the fifty-year rule keeps it off this page. The two halves of my family therefore meet in a marriage I have not drawn.

The direct line, my father’s side#

flowchart TD
  U13["Thirteen Uioreans at Feldioara, 1813 to 1849<br/>link to Petru not proven<br/>Iacov (b. c. 1783) and Mihail fit on age"]:::unk

  P["Petru Uiorean<br/>b. c. Jun 1820, d. 14 Feb 1882<br/>Plugariu, later Econom"]
  E["Eva Buta<br/>b. c. Jun 1821, d. 16 Jan 1879"]
  m1((" ")):::u
  U13 -.->|"parents unproven"| P
  P --- m1
  E --- m1

  I["Ioan Uiorean<br/>b. 4 Sep 1852, d. 6 May 1912<br/>Agronom"]
  MP["Maria Periat<br/>b. c. 1856 at Veresmort<br/>d. 30 Dec 1895"]
  m2((" ")):::u
  m1 --> I
  I --- m2
  MP --- m2

  V["Vichentie Uiorean / Ujvári<br/>b. 8 Nov 1880<br/>Econom"]
  VL["Victoria Litean / Liptai<br/>b. 7 Feb 1889"]
  m3((" ")):::u
  m2 --> V
  V --- m3
  VL --- m3

  G["Ioan Uiorean<br/>b. 8 Jul 1913<br/>my grandfather"]:::start
  MS["Minerva Sanislav<br/>my grandmother<br/>birth record not in the database"]:::start
  m4((" ")):::u
  m3 --> G
  G --- m4
  MS --- m4

  SP["Minerva's parents<br/>unknown, and not in the database"]:::unk
  C1["Ioachim Sanislau<br/>widowed Dec 1916"]:::cand
  C2["Ilie Sanislau Lup<br/>m. 1916, sons 1918 and 1919"]:::cand
  SP -.->|"parents unproven"| MS
  C1 -.->|"candidate"| SP
  C2 -.->|"candidate"| SP

  NEXT(["my father's generation<br/>alive, kept off this page"]):::off
  m4 -.-> NEXT

  classDef u fill:#444,stroke:#444,color:#fff
  classDef start fill:#1f6feb,stroke:#1f6feb,color:#fff
  classDef unk fill:none,stroke:#8b949e,color:#8b949e,stroke-dasharray: 5 4
  classDef cand fill:#8957e5,stroke:#8957e5,color:#fff
  classDef off fill:none,stroke:#484f58,color:#6e7681,stroke-dasharray: 2 3

Two unproven joins on this side, one at each end. Petru’s parents are unknown, because his 1843 marriage record names none and no birth record survives for him, so the thirteen earlier Uioreans in the village sit above him unattached. Minerva’s parents are unknown for a different reason: she is not in the database at all, and her people came from a parish it does not hold.

In plain text, with the marriages:

Petru Uiorean       b. c. Jun 1820   d. 14 Feb 1882   ploughman, later Econom
  x Eva Buta        b. c. Jun 1821   d. 16 Jan 1879   m. 31 Jan 1843, Feldioara
  |
  +- Ioan Uiorean   b. 4 Sep 1852    d. 6 May 1912    Agronom
       x Maria Periat    b. c. 1856 at Veresmort   d. 30 Dec 1895
       x Ileana Boldor   m. 13 May 1896 (he was 43)
       |
       +- Vichentie Uiorean   b. 8 Nov 1880    Econom
            x Victoria Litean b. 7 Feb 1889    m. 12 Nov 1906, engaged 21 Oct 1906
            |
            +- Ioan Uiorean   b. 8 Jul 1913    my grandfather
                 x Minerva Sanislav   my grandmother
                   (birth record not in the database)

My grandfather was one of seven. His parents married when Vichentie was 26 and Victoria was 17, and their children arrive between 1907 and 1923, where the database coverage ends.

Vichentie married on the same day as his sister Maria, 12 November 1906, in what must have been a double wedding.

The earliest ancestors on record#

The oldest document in all of this is a death record. On 11 November 1813 the parish buried Ion Uiorean, aged 50 years and 7 months, which puts his birth around April 1763. That is as far back as these registers reach, and he is the earliest person I can attribute to the family with any confidence. Nothing names his parents, his wife or his children, so he stands alone at the top of the page: a name, an age, and a date.

Behind him the paper stops. The Feldioara registers in this database begin in 1813, and everyone who died before that is simply outside the record.

A handful of others from that first generation, all reconstructed the same way, by subtracting an age at death from a date of death:

These ages are given to the day in the register, which is why the estimates look suspiciously precise. They are exactly as good as the clerk’s arithmetic and whatever the family told him.

The earliest ancestor I can actually prove a descent from is younger than all of them. That is Petru Uiorean, born around 7 June 1820, my three times great-grandfather. His 1843 marriage record names no parents and no birth record survives for him, so the chain from Ion in 1763 down to Petru in 1820 cannot be closed. On age, Iacov or Mihail would fit as Petru’s father. The records do not say, and I am not going to decide it for them.

One tempting record I have set aside: a Georgius Ujvári, an innkeeper (Caupo) who died in 1820 aged 60, which would mean a birth around 1760, earlier than anyone above. But his record gives no residence, and an innkeeper with a Latinised Hungarian name does not fit a village of Orthodox Romanian ploughmen. I think he belongs to someone else’s family.

Why the surname keeps changing#

This is the thing that makes the family hard to search for.

The name is one name in two languages, and the parish scribes wrote whichever they felt like. Across the records it appears as Uiorean, Uioreanu, Uiuorean, Uiărean, Uiuvorean, Uivărean, Ujuorean, Ujuărean, Ujuvorean, Ujuvoreanu, Ujuoren, Ujeorán, Uioran, and in Hungarian as Ujvári and Uivari. Several records give both at once: Uiorean(ujvári), Ujvári(uiorean), Vichentie Uiorean Ujvári, Ujuvoreanu&Uiărean, %Uivari% Uiărean.

The reason is geography. Uioara is the old Romanian name of Ocna Mureș, twelve kilometres away, and Hungarian Marosújvár. So Uiorean means “the man from Uioara” and Ujvári means “the man from Újvár”. They are the same toponymic surname, translated. The double entries are not a scribe hedging his bets, they are a bilingual clerk writing the name twice.

There is a reason beyond simple carelessness, and it is political. This village changed state more than once inside the span of these records. It was Habsburg, then part of the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary after 1867, then Romanian from 1918. Each administration had its own view of what a name officially was and which language it belonged in, and each one leaned on whoever was holding the pen. The registers sit right on that seam, so you can watch the pressure change from one page to the next.

You can date it from the documents themselves, and the calendar gives it away. My grandfather’s 1913 birth record is Julian, in Romanian, with the Hungarian form of the place name. The 1915 and 1916 birth records of his cousin Lucreția’s daughters are in Hungarian throughout, down to Székelyföldvár and Postaszolga, and they are Gregorian, because that is what the Hungarian civil registry used. Meanwhile the Orthodox parish a few streets away was still keeping Julian dates, and went on doing so through 1919. By 1921 the same village is recorded with the full Romanian administrative chain, “Feldioara, Vințul de Sus, Turda Arieș, Transilvania, România”, and the parish has switched to Gregorian too.

So for a stretch of years, two authorities in one village were writing the same families down in different languages, under different versions of their names, on two different calendars.

The variants are not really spelling mistakes, then. They are the same people being recorded by successive states with different rules about names, plus a village priest doing his best with whichever rule was current. A surname here is less a fixed string than something that got translated every time the border moved.

The best single proof sits outside the parish register. Lucreția Uiorean was born in the village on 26 March 1894. Her own daughters’ birth records, from 1915 and 1916, are written in Hungarian and give her name as Lukrécia Ujvári and Lukrecia Ujeorán, at Székelyföldvár.

The same doubling happens on my great-grandmother’s side, where Litean doubles as Liptai. She appears as “Victoria Litean Liptan” on her marriage record and “Victoria Liptai(litean)” on her children’s. Her brother Valeriu Litean, born 1 May 1895, turns up in the Hungarian Royal Army personnel gazette of September and October 1918 as “Liptai Valér, 1895, Székelyföldvár”. An Austro-Hungarian military clerk and an Orthodox village priest, with no connection to each other, wrote down the same man under both surnames.

Two similar looking surnames in the same registers are not this family: Uifelean / Uifelianu and its Hungarian pair Ujfalusi / Ujfalvi, which come from Uifalău, a different place. I have excluded them throughout.

Every spelling I found, exactly as the clerks wrote it, is listed under all the names in these records at the foot of the page.

Two men called Vichentie Uiorean#

Worth stating plainly, because it is the trap in these records.

Vichentie born 8 November 1880, son of Ioan Uiorean and Maria Periat, an Econom, a farmer with land. He married Victoria Litean on 12 November 1906 aged 26, which matches his birth date exactly. My grandfather is his son.

Vicentiu born 12 January 1884, son of Onisim Uiorean and Anastasia Demian, a Ziler, a day labourer. He married Victorie Șerban on 3 February 1908 at Cucerdea. Their children were Margaretă (1908), Ioan (1910) and Traian (1912).

Any index that groups people by name will make Traian, born 9 June 1912 in the same village, look like my grandfather’s brother. He is not. His mother is Victoria Șerban and both his parents are recorded as day labourers, where my great-grandparents are recorded as Econom and Economă.

Namesakes who are not family#

Recorded so nobody later mistakes them for relatives. An Ion Uioreanu was an investigating judge in Cluj, prominent in the early 1930s: a different man entirely, sitting as a judge while my grandfather was a schoolboy. A Lt. Maj. I. Uioreanu appears throughout the army paper Apărarea Patriei in 1957 and 1958, writing and taking photographs about engineer troops and the Military Engineering School. Given the arm, that one is a genuine trap, but it is a staff photographer on a Bucharest paper, and my grandfather was teaching in Războieni throughout. A Sándor Ujvári was a pharmacist at Marosújvár who died in 1891. A Georgius Ujvári, innkeeper, died in 1820. And an Ioan Uioran, a day labourer, died at Dej in 1860, a different county altogether.

The bigger trap is that both of my grandparents’ surnames are also Transylvanian place names. Uiorean is the ordinary adjective for Ocna Mureș, so the archive is full of “publicul uiorean” and an “Ansamblul folcloric Uiorean” that have nothing to do with anyone’s family. Sanislău is a commune in Satu Mare county. Most hits for either word are the place, not a person.

My grandmother’s family, the Sanislavs#

My grandmother was Minerva Uiorean, born Minerva Sanislav. Hers is the one name in this whole exercise that I cannot trace to her parents, and the reason is simply where the records stop. hpdt.ro ends in 1923 and she is not in it: no Minerva Sanislav appears anywhere in the database. The likeliest explanation is that she was born after 1923. Her marriage to my grandfather falls outside the coverage too.

What the records do show is that a Sanislav family was settled in the same village across the whole period. Six households appear, and nothing in these registers links them to one another:

The last two are the only plausible candidates for Minerva’s parents, because they are the only ones still in a position to have children after 1923: Ioachim was widowed at the end of 1916 and would almost certainly have remarried, and Ilie married Gervița Hetea in 1916 and was still having children in 1919. I cannot get closer than that, and I would rather say so than pick one.

The Lup alias#

The Sanislavs of this village carried a second name, Lup, Romanian for wolf. Ilie’s 1909 marriage record puts it beyond doubt by spelling him Sanislav Alias Lup, and it recurs as Georgie Sanislav Lup (1885), Ilie Sanislau Lup (1916), Rubin Sanislau Lup (1918) and Iulius Sanislau Lup (1919).

This is a different habit from the Uiorean and Ujvári pair. Uiorean and Ujvári are one name translated between two languages. Lup is a byname, the sort of nickname a village used to tell apart households that shared a surname. Both are at work in the same registers, and both will defeat anyone searching naively for a name.

One caution. There is a Hungarian equivalent of Sanislav, Szaniszló, and the database does contain it, but I have no evidence it was ever used for this family. The only Szaniszló connected to the village is József Szaniszló, a calvinist from Kolozsvár who married Róza Mihocsa of Székely Földvár on 8 April 1912: a Hungarian marrying in, not a village Sanislav written in Hungarian. So unlike Uiorean and Ujvári, I am not claiming a translated pair here.

They were not an old village family#

The database holds a cluster of Greek Catholic Sanislavs and Szaniszlávs in the salt district a little to the south, at Ujvár (Ocna Mureș), Ciunga, Veresmort and Căptalani, several of them recorded with the occupation Salicida, salt cutter. The Feldioara households are part of that cluster.

Read the denomination fields where the man himself is described rather than his children, and eleven of the fifty Sanislav records say greek catholic outright, while the men’s birthplaces and residences say Veresmort. So the Feldioara Sanislavs were Greek Catholic men from Veresmort who married Orthodox women of the village and settled there, between about 1875 and 1904, raising Orthodox children. The children are why the household reads as an old Orthodox village family at a glance: they were.

It matters for my grandmother rather than being a detail of nomenclature. Her people were incomers, and her own birth record is as likely to be in the Veresmort books as the Feldioara ones, and as likely to be Greek Catholic as Orthodox. That widens the search rather than narrowing it, but it points at a specific second parish.

Both families connect to the same neighbouring village, by opposite routes#

A pattern I did not expect. Veresmort, now Unirea, about eight kilometres away, turns up on both sides of my grandparents’ families, and the traffic runs in opposite directions.

On my grandfather’s side it is a bride: Maria Periat, my great-great-grandmother, was born at Veresmort and married Ioan Uiorean into Feldioara.

On my grandmother’s side it is the men. The Sanislav grooms are the ones recorded as being of Veresmort, and their wives are local Feldioara women: Iuliana Hertia, Adolfina Demian and Sofia Antonia are all entered as of Feldiora. Mateiu Sanislav’s birthplace is given as Veresmort outright, and Dianiziu and Ioachim are both recorded as greek catholic, of Vereșmort, marrying Orthodox Feldioara women in 1902 and 1904.

So one family took a wife from the next village, and the other was the next village, moving in.

The Triteans, and a bishop born in the village#

This part of the page exists because somebody asked me a direct question: is the family connected to Lucian Triteanu, born Lazăr Triteanu on 15 August 1872, Orthodox bishop of Roman from 1923 to 1947? He was born in this village, and the answer turned out to be yes, twice over, with one step I cannot close.

First, I am descended from the Triteans. My great-grandmother’s mother, Erodița Tritean, whom I previously had with no birth date and no parents, was born 14 January 1868 at Feldioara, daughter of Toma Tritean, a Plugariu and later Agronom, and Efimie Popa. She married Gregorie Litean, and their daughter Victoria Litean married Vichentie Uiorean in 1906. So Erodița is my great-great-grandmother, and Tritean is a direct line, not a family that merely married in.

Second, her brother married a Uiorean. Gregorie Tritean, born 29 January 1860 to the same parents, married Maria Uiorean on 13 February 1883, he 23 and she 16. Maria was Petru Uiorean’s daughter and my great-great-grandfather Ioan’s sister. A brother and a sister out of Toma Tritean’s household married into the two lines that later joined in 1906.

Both Tritean houses lost their mother in the same fortnight of 1877. Efimie Popa died on 5 May, aged 42, when Erodița was nine. Eight days later, on 13 May, Ana Vințeler died in the other Tritean house at the age of 34, leaving seven children, the fifth of them Lazăr, then four. The register contradicts itself slightly here: the seventh of those children, an Ioan, is entered as born on 1 August 1877, eleven weeks after his mother’s recorded death, so one of those two dates has to be wrong.

Identifying the bishop in the parish register#

The register has him, under the transcriber’s reading of the priest’s hand: “Ladiar Tritean”, hpdt.ro/tlooks/4428, born 15 August 1872, Julian, at Feldiora Secuiască, orthodox, son of Georgie Tritean, Agronom, and Ana Vintieleriu. Four things confirm it against the published biography, which has him as the fifth of the seven children of George Triteanu and Ana née Vințeler:

• his parents’ marriage, 3 November 1863 at Feldiora
• exactly seven children in the register between 1864 and 1877, with Ladiar the fifth
• his mother’s death on 13 May 1877, aged 34, which is the biography’s “motherless at five”
• his father’s remarriage to Maria Dragan on 12 February 1878

How close the kinship is, and where it stops#

The bridge between the two Tritean households is a wedding. The biography records that on 6 November 1911 Lazăr Triteanu officiated in the new church at Feldioara-Războieni at the marriage of “vărului său, Triteanu Romulus” to Homola Maria Victoria. That marriage is in the database: Romulus Tritean, 25, and Maria Victoria Homda, 17, on 6 November 1911 in the village. And Romulus was the son of Gregorie Tritean and Maria Uiorean, born 2 September 1885. So the future bishop stood at the altar for the wedding of Petru Uiorean’s grandson, and called him cousin.

If văr is meant strictly, then Georgie and Toma were brothers, which would make the bishop a first cousin of my great-great-grandmother Erodița, my own first cousin four times removed, and my descent a descent from his uncle.

I cannot prove that step, and I am not going to assert it. Toma’s death record names no father, neither man’s marriage record has parent fields at all, and the word văr is used loosely in Romanian for kin of roughly one’s own age. The ages allow brothers: Toma was born about 1828 and Georgie about 1839. There is a Georgie Tritean born 1839 to an Ioan Tritean, but the transcriber recorded that family’s surname as Nistor%%Tritean%%, two readings at once, so it will not carry the weight. What is solid is that both households were Tritean and orthodox in one small village, that they treated each other as cousins, and that I descend from one of them.

What happened after the registers stop#

The parish records end in 1923 and show a family of farmers. The newspapers pick the story up two decades later and show something else entirely: the family had moved onto the railway.

Războieni-Cetate is a major junction on the main line, which is the reason.

The shift starts earlier than the newspapers show, and it is visible inside the parish register. When Romulus Tritean had a son baptised on 14 September 1913, the priest recorded his occupation as Actariu la calea ferată, railway clerk. Romulus was Maria Uiorean’s son and my great-grandmother’s first cousin, and that entry, ten years before the register closes, is the first railway job anywhere in these families.

• Romulus Triteanu then went a long way. The biography of his cousin the bishop calls him the first Romanian station master at Războieni after 1918. Under that name Arcanum has a CFR line chief at Cluj in 1926, an inspector through the late 1920s, a principal inspector in the Monitorul Oficial lists of 1933 and an inspector general in 1935. By December 1941 he was back in the village as its mayor: Tribuna on 7 December and Țara on 9 December carry the same item, “D. Romulus Triteanu, fost inspector C. F. R., actualul primar al fruntașei comune din județul nostru”, founding a village cultural home and putting on a festival at the primary school with a newly arrived teacher, Laurențiu Roșca. The Cluj career items are an identification on the name and the career shape, not on a place of birth, so I hold them a little more loosely than the two 1941 ones, which name the village.
• A Vicențiu Uioreanu was station master (șeful stației CFR) at Războieni through the war years. He turns up in Universul on 1 March 1942 and Tribuna on 4 March 1942, both reporting the prefect’s visit to the recruits’ canteen at the station; in Tribuna again on 8 May 1942, arriving at the scene when a wagon-inspection worker was injured at the station, alongside the police chief; in Țara on 21 May 1942, listed at a national celebration; in Foaia poporului on 30 January 1944 as “Uiorean Vicențiu șef de gară”; and in both România Liberă and Scânteia on 26 April 1945, in the affair described below. Which Vichentie this is I cannot settle from the press alone. On age it is more likely my grandfather’s eldest brother, born 1907, than their father, born 1880.
• An Uiorean Valer was commended as a mechanic in Lupta Ardealului on 15 September 1948. My grandfather’s brother Valer, born 1921, would have been 27. No place is given, so this one is suggestive only.
• On the Litean side, Litean Ana was a cleaner at Războieni station, injured in the triple train collision there on 6 July 1936 and reported in Aranyosvidék, Magyar Ujság and Hirlap. Valeriu Litean was a storekeeper at the station in 1972, and a Litean Emil of Războieni-Cetate appears in a 1946 court notice.

The 1945 purge list#

That last item is worth setting out properly, because it is the one place where the family brushes against national politics. On 26 April 1945 both Scânteia and România Liberă carried the same Ministry of Communications communiqué: a list of fourteen station masters and goods clerks around the country who had loaded wagons fără aprobare, without central authorisation, of maize, salt, soda, wine, barley and oats. Item 13 is “Uioreanu V., șeful stației Războieni”, charged with 92 supplementary collective wagons plus 9 complete ones of salt and soda. All fourteen were dismissed, and the communiqué says arrest orders and referrals to the courts were issued at the same time. Scânteia adds that they should be “branded with the red-hot iron of public contempt”.

It was a communist operation, and the page says so itself. Scânteia was the Communist Party’s paper, the same page carries party recruitment notices and People’s Tribunal proceedings, and the article names the two men running the ministry as “tovarășul Ministru Gheorghiu-Dej și tovarășul Ministru Maurer”: Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a former railway worker and the future communist leader of Romania, seven weeks after the Soviet-backed Groza government took power. The railways were the party’s core industrial base, and Communications was one of the instruments it used to clear out the old apparatus.

Whether he actually did anything improper I cannot tell, and I am wary of both easy readings. The charge is oddly specific for a smear, and it is not a lone accusation: the three stations listed consecutively are Uioara (Ocna Mureș, with its salt mine and soda works), Războieni and Unirea, adjacent stops on the same line, all cited for salt and soda. That looks like a whole traffic corridor being swept, or a long-standing local habit of shipping the works’ output. What is clear is how elastic the offence was in 1945: Romania owed enormous reparations deliveries to the USSR under the Armistice Convention and rail capacity was the bottleneck, so moving wagons off the plan could be recast as sabotage whenever it suited. Something that had probably been ordinary practice became a crime the moment a communist minister needed the wagons and needed the station masters replaced.

The archive then goes quiet on him. That communiqué is his last appearance, and I do not know whether the arrest order was ever carried out.

My grandmother, and two more Sanislavs at the station#

My grandmother worked at that station too. Minerva Uiorean appears twice in Unirea in 1972, both times in pieces praising the restaurant at Războieni station: on 20 September as “Minerva Uioreanu, ajutor șef unitate”, assistant head of the unit, and on 31 December among the restaurant’s staff. Later items, which the fifty-year rule keeps off this page, show her running the place.

Two more Sanislav traces from the village, for the record:

• An M. Sanislav took part in the village cultural evenings, the șezători, at Războieni in the summer of 1944, reported identically in Universul on 6 August and Tribuna on 13 August. The full item describes Leontina Nemeș, a teacher at the girls’ high school in Turda, running weekly șezători in the commune together with ASTRA and the local teaching staff. Minerva would have been in her twenties, and my grandfather was posted to the village school the following year. It is an initial, though, and I am not going to pretend it is more than that.
• A Sanislav Petru played for the CFR Războieni football team in September 1968 (Unirea, 10 September), one more Sanislav in the railway community there.

My grandfather, Ioan Uiorean#

He took the other route out of farming: he trained as a teacher, and the paper trail on him is the fullest in this whole exercise. Ioan Uiorean, born 8 July 1913.

School in Cluj, 1931 to 1937#

He was at the Școala Normală de Băieți din Cluj, the boys’ teacher-training college. He appears in its end-of-year prize lists in the Cluj daily Patria two years running:

• 4 July 1931, under “La școala normală de băieți”: “Cl. II.: Grigoriță N., Uiorean Ion, Popa Ion, David Ion, Tulbure Emil, Marițiu Ilie.”
• 12 June 1932, in the section “La școala normală de băieți”, under the director Dumitru Goga: “Cl. III. Uiorean Ion, Grigoriță Nicolae, Popa Ion.”

The same three boys move from Cl. II to Cl. III together, which is what makes this a real pupil rather than a coincidence of names. A later gazette gives his graduation as series 1937, with an average of 7.10, and that closes the loop: Cl. II in 1930/31 puts Cl. VII in 1936/37.

One detail from the 1932 article that I liked. It records that the Cluj normal school pupils regularly went out to villages to perform for ASTRA, in national costume, with choir and orchestra. That is the same ASTRA behind the wartime cultural evenings at Războieni, and it is recognisably the same work he was doing at the village culture house twenty-five years later.

Commissioned in the engineers, 1940#

By royal decree of Carol II, on the report of the Ministry of National Defence no. 16.960 of 4 June 1940, published in Monitorul Oficial, Partea I, nr. 130, of 7 June 1940:

“Înălțăm la gradul de sublocotenent de rezervă pe data de 8 Iunie 1940 … pe tinerii cu termen redus … care au absolvit … cursurile reduse, seria I-a ce au funcționat pe lângă Centrele de instrucție ale armelor respective; repartizându-se la unități:”

Under the arm heading Geniu, in the Curs redus, Seria I-a list, is the entry “Uiorean V. Ioan”. These lists give surname, then the father’s initial, then the given name, so that is Ioan, son of V[ichentie].

So he was commissioned a reserve second lieutenant in the engineers on 8 June 1940. Two things follow from the wording. Termen redus, reduced service, was the shortened conscription open to men with a diploma, which is the normal school qualification doing its work. And the decree assigns the new officers “la unități” without printing which, so I cannot name his unit.

He was commissioned three weeks before Romania lost Bessarabia and two months before it lost northern Transylvania.

Teaching, 1941 to 1974#

Eight items track him, and the first two are not in Transylvania at all.

He did not start in his own village. He qualified in 1937, was commissioned in 1940, and in October 1941 was posted to Păpușoi in Cetatea-Albă county, in the far south of Bessarabia, one of a long list of teachers sent to the province in the months after Romania retook it. He earned his tenure there in the summer of 1943, with a mark of 8.84 against the 7.10 he left college with. Bessarabia was lost again in August 1944, and the October 1945 gazette that posts him to Războieni-Cetate is him coming home after it.

After that he stayed: school director by 1951, still running the culture house in 1959, back to classroom teaching by 1963 with someone else as head, and still being quoted on the school’s exam results in 1974, at 61.

The culture house has a family history of its own. A cămin cultural was set up in the village in December 1941 by the mayor, Romulus Triteanu, who was his mother’s first cousin. Whether the one my grandfather was running in the 1950s was that same institution or a communist refoundation with the same name, I cannot tell from the press.

One caveat I cannot remove. The 1940 military entry carries the father’s initial V., which fits. The 1941 and 1944 teaching entries do not, and his cousin was also an Ioan Uiorean with a father called Vichentie. What argues for my grandfather rather than the cousin is the path itself: the cousin’s father was a day labourer, and normal school followed by a reserve officer course was not the road out of that household. It is a strong case, not a closed one.

And one thing I have deliberately left out. The family account is that he served as a genist, a combat engineer, was engaged in demining, and was wounded. The commission above is the hard part of that, and it matches. The rest I cannot document: Romania did not publish named casualty lists in the Second World War, only aggregate figures, so a wound or a demining assignment was never going to appear in a newspaper. Those records sit in the military archives at Pitești, not here.

My mother’s side: the Conț and the Antohi#

Everything above comes out of one transcribed parish. My mother’s side has no such luck, and this section is much thinner than the one before it for a reason that has nothing to do with her family and everything to do with which registers a university project happened to type up.

hpdt.ro does not reach any of it. A search on the place field returns nothing at all for Aiud or Teiuș, the two towns this family actually lived in, and nothing for Bistrița-Năsăud, where they came from before that. So the database that produced four generations of Uioreans is silent here, and its silence says nothing whatever about the Conț or the Antohi. It only says where the database stops, which is worth keeping in mind before reading any absence on this page as a finding.

What follows is therefore a different kind of section. There are no parish registers in it. It is a gravestone, a handful of official gazette entries, an eighteenth-century census, and a surname argument, and where a fact rests on family memory rather than a document I say so.

The line, such as it is#

Drawn to the same conventions as my father’s side above, and the contrast is the point: almost every line on it is dotted.

flowchart TD
  DC["David Conț"]:::mem
  MC["Marta Conț"]:::mem
  n1((" ")):::u
  DC --- n1
  MC --- n1

  AH["Ana's husband<br/>my great-grandfather<br/>name unknown"]:::unk
  AA["Ana Antohi, b. Teorean<br/>1902 to 1962<br/>buried at Aiud"]
  n2((" ")):::u
  AH --- n2
  AA --- n2

  AC["Alexandru Conț<br/>1923 to 1964<br/>d. at the Aiud works"]:::start
  EA["Elena Antohi<br/>b. 1923, married name Conț"]:::start
  n3((" ")):::u
  n1 -.->|"family memory"| AC
  n2 -.->|"family memory"| EA
  AC --- n3
  EA --- n3

  NEXT(["my mother's generation<br/>alive, kept off this page"]):::off
  n3 -.-> NEXT

  NC["Nicolae Conț of Dipșa<br/>b. 25 May 1894, Orthodox<br/>renounced US citizenship 1929"]:::cand
  TM["Teoreanu Martin, plotonier<br/>b. c. 1896, gendarme<br/>Cluj inspectorate to 1937"]:::cand
  AC -.-|"kin of the Dipșa Conț?"| NC
  AA -.-|"her brother? hypothesis"| TM

  classDef u fill:#444,stroke:#444,color:#fff
  classDef start fill:#1f6feb,stroke:#1f6feb,color:#fff
  classDef mem fill:none,stroke:#8b949e,color:#8b949e,stroke-dasharray: 5 4
  classDef unk fill:none,stroke:#8b949e,color:#8b949e,stroke-dasharray: 5 4
  classDef cand fill:#8957e5,stroke:#8957e5,color:#fff
  classDef off fill:none,stroke:#484f58,color:#6e7681,stroke-dasharray: 2 3

Three solid boxes, three dotted ones, and not one solid line of descent. Ana Antohi, Alexandru Conț and Elena Antohi are documented, by a gravestone and nothing else. David and Marta Conț are names my family gave me with no record behind them. Ana’s husband, my great-grandfather, has no name at all, and he is the person on either side of my family I would most like to put a name to.

The two purple boxes are candidates rather than relatives. Neither is tied to the family by anything except a surname, a place and a plausible date, and both are set out below.

Three names, and a grave at Aiud#

All three documented people are buried on one cross in the Roman Catholic cemetery at Aiud, which I read in August 2026 and which is the only document of any kind I have for two of them.

Two things the cross settles and one it does not.

It dates the accident to 1964. That does not open the accident up, because the Romanian press of that period did not print named industrial fatalities at all: it reported work accidents in aggregate and in the safety-campaign register, and named the dead only in traffic accidents. So the accident is not findable in a newspaper, whatever year it is searched against, and that is a property of what the papers were willing to print.

It puts Ana Antohi at Aiud, a hundred kilometres from where family memory places her people. So she left the north and followed her daughter, and the two women died within three years of each other, in 1962 and 1964.

It does not explain the Roman Catholic ground, and nor can I. The Conț of Dipșa who can be dated was Orthodox, and the Alba county Conț turn up in both Orthodox and Greek Catholic subscription lists. Ana Antohi is the Antohi on that cross and Antohi is a Moldavian surname, and Moldavian Catholic country is a real thing, which is one reading. My grandmother’s second husband was Hungarian, which is another. And after the Greek Catholic Church was suppressed in 1948, Greek Catholics who would not go over to Orthodoxy commonly used Roman Catholic churches and cemeteries, which is a third and needs no ancestry at all. A cross cut after the last of three deaths does not say what rite anybody was buried with. The burial register would.

Where they came from#

Family memory puts the Conț at Dipșa and the Antohi at Lechința, two neighbouring communes about ten kilometres apart in Bistrița-Năsăud, both of them old Transylvanian Saxon villages. Between the wars they sat in the same sub-county district, and an official roster of December 1939 shows a plasa Lechința in județul Năsăud containing the commune that holds Dipșa. Whatever brought my grandparents together, they did not have far to look.

That is where they were living. It is not where the Antohi are from, and the difference matters.

Antohi is not a Transylvanian name. Crossed against Lechința, Dipșa, Bistrița-Năsăud or Năsăud in the Arcanum archive, under every spelling I could think of, it returns nothing at all. Every concentration of it is Moldavian or Bessarabian: Iași, Bacău, Vaslui, Roman, Vrancea, Covurlui. A single gazette page of teacher postings in the Fălciu and Vaslui district in 1945 names four Antohis. The Bistrița district names none, ever.

Family memory points the same way. Ana Antohi was born a Teorean, and her brother was a mayor at Ivești, which is in Galați, in Moldova. That makes the surname native to the family instead of anomalous, and it explains what an Antohi household was doing in a Saxon village: it had arrived from the east.

And there is a documented road for that, going back a long way. A Bistrița magistrate’s decision of 20 April 1630 formally admitted Romanians din Moldova to settle at Vermeș, the village next to Lechința, capped at twelve heads of household. An investigation of 15 April 1749 then interrogated twelve Romanian men of Vermeș and described them as “parte născuți în Vermiș, parte veniți din Petriș, Lechința, Serețel, Maieru, Leșu, Vărarea și din Moldova”. So this exact cluster of villages was absorbing Moldavian Romanians by permission from 1630 and was still recording arrivals from Moldova in 1749. That proves nothing about my own family. It moves the eastern reading off plausible reasoning and onto a route that demonstrably existed.

Neither surname was at either village in 1761. The Năsăud historical review Arhiva Someșană printed, in its 1937 volume, the returns of a commission sent round the Saxon villages of the Bistrița district after the Orthodox reoccupation of the churches in January 1761. Every Romanian head of household was asked whether he was Uniate and the clerk wrote down his name with his answer, which makes it a house-by-house census at a named date. Lechința gives twenty-two men, Dipșa ten, and there is no Antohi and no Conț or Koncz in either, or in the eighteen other villages of the same return. The names are Moldovan, Roman, Bota, Borgovan, Zăgrean, Bidian, Alb, Sângeorzan, Negrea, Opre, Moroșan. Read carefully that is heads of household and not a register, so it cannot exclude a servant or a landless man, but it does say that neither family belonged to the settled Romanian households of either village in 1761. Both arrived later.

Conț and Koncz are one name, which is the same trick as Uiorean and Ujvári#

This is the part of my mother’s side that rhymes with my father’s, and it has the same kind of proof behind it.

Hungarian Koncz and Romanian Conț are both pronounced /konts/. They are one name in two orthographies.

One letter, four men, both spellings#

On my father’s side the surname argument turns on Liptai Valér: one man written down by an Austro-Hungarian army clerk and by a Romanian village priest, under two different surnames, neither knowing about the other. There is an equivalent on my mother’s side, and it is better, because it is not two documents about one man. It is one document printed twice.

In 1907 the Romanian villagers of Bazéd and Mezőrücsi Néma, today Bozed and Nima Râciului in Mureș county, clubbed together and outbid the neighbouring Székely village for an estate belonging to Count Bethlen István, the future prime minister of Hungary. They then wrote to thank him. Three years later the Marosvásárhely paper Székely Lapok printed the letter in full, on 10 March 1910, inside a hostile profile of Bethlen headed “Ki ez a Bethlen István?”, the charge being that he had sold ancestral land to Romanians:

…ősi Kemény birtokot már eladja a bazédi oláhoknak, noha a szabédi székelyek is kérték.

Kelt Mezőrücsi Némában 1907. Covaciu Vaszilika, Covaciu Julius, Gora Vaszi, Degár Petru, Boer Lajos, Koncz Augusztin, Koncz Nikuláj, Illyés Lázár, Koncz Ávrám, Koncz Juon

Four years after that, the Romanian papers reprinted the same letter and turned every name back into Romanian. Drapelul of Lugoj on 6 May 1914 and Unirea of Blaj on 21 May 1914 both give the signatures as:

Vasilică Covaciu, Vasi Gora, Ludovic Boer, Niculaie Conț, Avram Conț, Iuliu Covaciu, Petru Dogar, Augustin Conț, Lazăr Hic, Ioan Conț

Koncz becomes Conț four times over, in one list. You can watch the translation happening in the other names too: Boer Lajos becomes Ludovic Boer, Degár Petru becomes Petru Dogar, Juon becomes Ioan, and poor Illyés Lázár comes out as the meaningless “Lazăr Hic”.

None of these four men is a relative of mine as far as I know. Bozed is 35 km from the nearest village my family is associated with, and nothing connects them but the surname. What the letter proves is the rule: searching for Conț without also searching Koncz will miss half of anything. That is worth more to me than another name would have been.

The letter had a long afterlife, incidentally. Hungarian papers kept reprinting it to attack Bethlen for selling to Romanians and Romanian papers to celebrate the same fact: in 1914, again in Budapest in 1932, and once more in 1937. By then the man they were still arguing about had served ten years as prime minister and been out of office for six.

The state itself used both spellings#

Buletinul Oficial, Partea a III-a, of 23 December 1970 carries a lost-licence notice:

Koncz Ștefan, domiciliat în comuna Lechința, str. Gării nr. 500, județul Bistrița-Năsăud, aduce la cunoștință pierderea permisului de conducere … pe numele de Konț Ștefan.

He reports himself as Koncz. The licence issued to him five months earlier was made out to Konț. One man, two spellings, two documents, one year, and it comes from the very commune where my mother’s family sat.

The county press does the same thing with individuals months apart. The Alba paper prints a Moise Conț in 1973 and a Moise Koncz in 1972 and a Moise Kontz in 1974: three spellings of one name in one newspaper inside sixteen months. An Adalbert Conț at the Sebeș timber combine in February 1972 is Koncz Adalbert, director of the sawmill, that August. Same habit as Uiorean(ujvári), same county, same decade, a different family from mine.

So the spellings to carry are Conț, Cont, Koncz, Kontz, Konc and, rarely, Concz.

Antohi and Antohe are also one name, and this one is documented rather than inferred. Buletinul Oficial of 19 November 1974 has an “Antohe Constantin … solicită schimbarea numelui său de familie din Antohe în acela de Antohi”, and there are petitions running the other way too. A court report in Gazeta de Iassi of 13 December 1895 calls its witness “Gh. Antohi” in one sentence and “Gh. Antohe” in the next. Antohie is the source of both, being the Romanian form of the given name Antioh, borne by the Moldavian prince Antohie Cantemir; Antohi, Antohe and Antofie are patronymics from it.

But Antochi is a trap. In Romanian orthography ch before e or i is /k/, so Antochi reads an-TO-ki and is a genuinely separate surname with its own bearers. In a foreign clerk’s hand it is the opposite, because German, Hungarian and Polish ch is /x/, so an Austro-Hungarian or Swiss clerk writing a Romanian /antohi/ would naturally spell it Antochi. Treat it as the same name only in foreign-authored records.

The documented Conț: two gazette entries and a man who went to America#

Three people on this side are in the official gazettes, which is more than the newspapers ever gave me, because a gazette prints a person only when the state has done something to them.

Nicolae Conț of Dipșa, born 25 May 1894, is the best single document on this side of the family. Monitorul Oficial, Partea 1, of 14 August 1929, file no. 54 of that year, before the naturalisation commission:

D. Nicolae Conț, român de origină, supus american, de profesiune econom, domiciliat în comuna Dipșa, județul Năsăud, născut în acea comună la data de 25 Mai 1894, de religie ortodoxă, a făcut la această comisiune cerere de a i se acorda naționalitatea română, declarând că renunță la cetățenia americană și la orice altă supușenie străină.

The decision follows in the gazette of 13 February 1930, over Iuliu Maniu’s signature, and there he is a cattle dealer rather than a farmer. So: born in Dipșa on a known day, emigrated to the United States, took American citizenship, came home, and in 1929 gave it up to be Romanian again. Born 1894, he is the right generation to be my great-grandfather’s brother or cousin, and nothing yet ties him to the family beyond the surname and the village.

Two things follow from him. He was Orthodox, which is hard evidence on the confession question and points away from a Hungarian Reformed or Greek Catholic reading of the Conț surname itself. And a Romanian villager who held American citizenship before 1929 will be in indexed American federal records that routinely name the exact birth village and the next of kin left behind: naturalisation petitions, passenger manifests, the 1917 to 1918 draft registration cards, the federal censuses. That is the most promising untried avenue anywhere in this research, and Transylvanian Romanians of that period usually appear under Hungary or Austria-Hungary rather than Romania, which is the thing that would make you miss him.

Conț Anghel of Teiuș appears in Monitorul Oficial of 11 November 1927, where a pension certificate numbered 92,789 and dated 1 April 1920 is declared null, the original having been lost. A pension being drawn from April 1920 by a man at Teiuș is very plausibly a war pension, which would put a Conț adult in Austro-Hungarian service, and it puts the surname in that town before the First World War ended.

There is a third Conț of Teiuș in the gazettes, in a name-change petition, but it is recent enough to fall past the fifty-year line so it stays in my notes. Worth recording in general terms, though: the Schimbări de nume series is the one part of the gazettes that reliably prints a petitioner’s parents, which is why it is where I would look next on this side.

Teoreanu Martin, gendarme, who would reconcile the two geographies#

If Ana Antohi was born a Teorean and her brother was a mayor at Ivești, then that brother is the single most useful person to find on this side, and there is a candidate.

Monitorul Oficial of 1 March 1938 carries a Ministry of National Defence decision of 17 February that transfers a list of re-engaged gendarmes to the reserve as of 31 December 1937. Entry 15 is “Teoreanu Martin, plotonier”. A lost-document notice of 13 July 1938 then gives him a military booklet of contingent 1917 issued by the Inspectoratul General al Jandarmilor Cluj, a pension booklet of 1936 and a pension approved in 1938, and puts him at Bucharest.

Two things come out of that. A Romanian contingent year is normally the year a man turned twenty-one, so contingent 1917 means born about 1896. Ana was born in 1902, and a brother born about 1896 fits without strain. And the Cluj gendarmerie inspectorate covered Bistrița-Năsăud, including Lechința. Gendarmes were posted far from home as a matter of policy, so a Moldavian Teoreanu serving in Transylvania in the 1920s and 1930s is exactly the mechanism that would put this family at Lechința for a period and then return it east, which would let both halves of family memory be true at once instead of competing.

I want that read as a hypothesis. Nothing in any of these documents mentions Ivești, Galați or a mayoralty, nothing links this gendarme to Ana, and Martin is not confirmed as her brother’s name at all. What he has going for him is only this: he is the right age, and he is demonstrably tied to Transylvania. That is two more things than a name in a memory has, and it is a long way short of a person.

One spelling note, because it decides where to search. Teorean with no final u has no Moldavian bearers at all: its cluster is Arad and Bihor, in Crișana, three hundred kilometres the wrong way. Teoreanu with the u is the Old Kingdom form, and it is the one that turns up at Ivești, Tecuci and Brăila. That is the ordinary Transylvanian against Regat pattern for Romanian surnames, and it means the two may be one name in two forms or two unrelated families. Search both. Do not confuse either with Tritean on my father’s side, or with Chiorean, which Hungarian military clerks wrote Tyiorean. Teorean, Tritean, Chiorean and Uiorean are four different surnames.

Why so little, and what would change it#

The honest summary is that I have three dates from a stone, a handful of gazette entries and a surname argument, against four generations on my father’s side. The reasons are worth setting out because they are all properties of the sources rather than of the family.

• No transcribed parish. hpdt.ro covers neither Aiud and Teiuș nor anywhere in Bistrița-Năsăud. The Orthodox parish registers for Lechința and Dipșa exist, in the Bistrița-Năsăud county branch of the National Archives, and they are not online. For anything before about 1800 the register to ask for is Vermeș, because the 1761 return shows Lechința’s Romanians had no church of their own and were walking there.
• No local press for the years that matter. The Alba county paper exists in Arcanum only from 1968, and the Cluj regional daily only from 1968. There is no Alba or Cluj local press in the archive before that at all, so the years around my grandfather’s death are simply not held. The Bistrița paper does run through the 1950s and early 1960s, which is why the Dipșa relatives are traceable in print in a way the Aiud family is not.
• The surnames fight back. Conț searched without diacritics also matches cont, the Romanian for “account”, so a plain search for it in an archive full of interwar bank balance sheets returns ten thousand hits and no people. Antohi matches every longer name beginning the same way. Cunțan and Conțiu are separate surnames one letter away, and a search snippet will clip Conțiu to Conț and hand you a stranger.
• And a search snippet will manufacture the coincidence you are hoping for. Newspaper pages carry several unrelated articles, and the snippet extractor welds fragments from across them into one plausible-looking sentence. There is no Antohi at Lechința in the Bistrița paper: the hits that look like one are a library reader in a different commune, named twenty lines away in a separate report on the same page. Nothing on this side is usable until the whole page has been read, and that is the single most important rule here.

What would actually move it: the Aiud civil death registers for 1962 and 1964, since a Romanian death entry names the deceased’s parents and birthplace, and Ana’s 1962 entry would settle Ivești against Lechința and confirm or destroy the Teorean maiden name in one line. Then the Ivești registers in Galați, the Lechința and Dipșa parish books in Bistrița, and Nicolae Conț’s American paperwork.

The living members of this family are of course the best source of all, and they are not on this page.

The two archives#

hpdt.ro#

The Historical Population Database of Transylvania at hpdt.ro is a research project of Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj together with UiT The Arctic University of Norway, funded through the EEA and Norway Grants. It transcribes Transylvanian parish registers into a searchable database: at the time I used it, 70,225 births, 19,530 marriages and 55,696 deaths, running from roughly 1813 to 1923.

What makes it valuable for this is the level of detail retained. A birth record carries not just names and dates but both parents’ denominations, occupations, residences and birthplaces. Death records carry age to the day, cause of death, and burial place. That is what makes it possible to distinguish two men with the same name in the same village.

It also preserves the transcribers’ uncertainty rather than smoothing it away, which I appreciate: square brackets for illegible text as in Miha[Il], %...% and @ and & for alternative readings, ?? for a guess. The database is a transcription of what the priest actually wrote, not a tidied version of it, and the messiness is the evidence.

Credit where it is due: without this project none of the nineteenth century here would be reachable at all.

Arcanum#

Arcanum at adt.arcanum.com is a large commercial digital archive of Hungarian and Romanian newspapers, periodicals and official gazettes, with full-text search and named-entity indexing. It is the reason I have anything at all about the twentieth century, and the reason I can explain the surname.

A disclaimer on how I searched it. I queried Arcanum through a Model Context Protocol server I wrote myself. It is a custom, unofficial integration: not built by Arcanum, not endorsed by them, not supported by them, and not affiliated with them in any way. It is a thin wrapper around their public search, written for my own convenience. Anyone reproducing this work should just use the site directly. If any of my Arcanum citations are wrong, the fault is mine or my wrapper’s, not the archive’s.

Method#

I did not do this by hand. Both archives above are searchable, and the work was in figuring out how to search them rather than in reading.

Starting point. My grandfather’s birth record, hpdt.ro/tlooks/430, which names his parents and their occupations. From there it is a matter of walking backwards: each birth record names both parents, so you look for the father’s own birth record, confirm it against his age on his marriage record, and repeat.

The search is a prefix match, not a substring match. This mattered more than anything else. Searching Uior returns 41 births, Uiorean returns 40, and iorean returns nothing at all. Guessing spellings would have quietly missed every variant I had not thought of, and given the list of spellings below, that would have been most of them. So instead of guessing I swept the two-letter prefixes Ui and Uj, which between them catch every form the scribes used, plus Litean and Liptai for my great-grandmother’s side and Sanisl, Szani and Stanisl for my grandmother’s. That returned 819 records, which I filtered down to 214 by matching the surname clusters and excluding the unrelated Uifelean and Ujfalusi families.

One later sweep, added when I went looking for the Triteans. The prefix Trit returns 275 records, 168 births, 28 marriages and 79 deaths, and that is where everything above about Erodița Tritean’s parents and the bishop’s household comes from. It is a reminder that the first sweep was built around three surnames and stops dead at the fourth.

The search also matches any name field, mother and father and groom and bride, not just the subject. That is what catches the women, who otherwise vanish from a surname search the moment they marry.

Establishing sibling sets. Grouping every birth by parent couple, allowing for spelling drift in the given names, is what turns a pile of records into families. It is also what exposed the two Vichentie problem: two couples, two different mothers, two different occupations, one name.

Ages at death are the best dating tool in these registers. They are given to the day, like 61y8m7d, which is how I have estimated birth dates for people whose own birth record does not survive. They are exactly as reliable as the clerk’s arithmetic.

Cross-checking. The parish records and the newspapers are entirely independent sources, which is the point of using both. The parish register gave me Valeriu Litean born 1 May 1895; the Hungarian army gazette gave me Liptai Valér born 1895 at Székelyföldvár. Neither source knows about the other, and that is what makes the Litean and Liptai identity a finding rather than a guess.

Every newspaper and gazette reference on my father’s side#

The parish registers stop in 1923. Everything I know after that came out of the Arcanum press archive, so here is the full list of what it turned up, in date order. The fifty-year rule applies: I hold later items and they are not listed. The maternal citations are given inline in the section on my mother’s side rather than repeated here, since there are only a handful of them.

Four of these I read in full rather than trusting a search snippet: the 1945 Monitorul Oficial page, to confirm the entry really sits in a list of primary teacher appointments; the 1944 Universul item, to see who the cultural evenings actually involved; and both December 1941 notices about the cultural home, which is how I know the mayor of the village was a Triteanu and what he was doing there.

All the names in these records#

Collected for anyone searching for a relative. The database preserves whatever the clerk wrote, including his uncertainty, so one family can hide behind dozens of strings. Square brackets are the transcriber marking illegible text, %...% and @ and & and / mark alternative readings, and ?? is a guess. I have left the clerical slips in, because they are what is actually in the database and therefore what you have to search for.

Uiorean, and its Hungarian form Ujvári#

39 distinct spellings in the registers, which reduce to these name forms:

Roșca, Uioran, Uiorean, Uiorean Uivari, Uiorean Ujvari, Uiorean Ujvári, Uioreanu, Uiuorean, Uiuvorean, Uivari, Uivărean, Uiórean, Uiărean, Ujeorán, Ujuorean, Ujuoren, Ujuorieanu, Ujuvorean, Ujuvoreanu, Ujuvorán, Ujuărean, Ujvári, Ujvári E

As literally written, most frequent first, transcription marks and all:

Uiorean; Uiuorean; Uiărean; Ujuorean; [Uiărean]; [Uiorean]; Ujvári; Uiuvorean; Ujuvoreanu&Uiărean; Uiorean(ujvári); [Uiuorean]; [Uiuvorean]; [Ujuvoreanu&Uiărean]; Ui[ărean??]; Uioran; Ujuorieanu&Uiărean; Ujuărean; Ujvári(uiorean); %Roșca%Uiărean; %Uiorean%; %Uivari% Uiărean; %Ujuvorán%; [Uiărean??]; [Ujuorieanu&Uiărean]; [Ujuărean]; U[I]Orean; Ui??ărean; Uiorean Uivari; Uiorean Ujvari; Uiorean Ujvári; Uioreanu; Uivari; Uivărean; Uiórean; Uiă[Rea]N; Ujeorán; Ujuoren; Ujuvorean; Ujvári E

Sanislav, and its byname Lup#

19 distinct spellings in the registers, which reduce to these name forms:

Lup, Sanislau, Sanislau Lup, Sanislav, Sanislav Lup, Sanislavu, Stanislau, Stanislavu, Szaniszlau, Szaniszlav, Szaniszlavu, Szaniszlo, Szaniszláv, Szaniszló, Szanisztás

As literally written, most frequent first, transcription marks and all:

Sanislau; Sanislav; Sanislavu; Sanislau Lup; Szaniszlo; Szaniszláv; Lup(sanislau); Lup/ Sanislau; Stanislau; [Stanislau]; Sanislav Alias Lup; Sanislav Lup; Sanislav??; Stanislavu; Szaniszlau; Szaniszlav; Szaniszlavu; Szaniszló; Szanisztás

Litean, and its Hungarian form Liptai#

13 distinct spellings in the registers, which reduce to these name forms:

Liptai, Litea, Litean, Litean Liptai, Litean Liptan, Liteanu, Lpitai

As literally written, most frequent first, transcription marks and all:

Litean; Litean(liptai); [Litean]; Litean (Liptai); Liteanu; Liptai(litean); Liptai; Liptai/Litean; Litea; Litean Liptai; Litean Liptan; Litean/Liptai; Litean/Lpitai

Families who married in, or whose records overlap#

67 further surnames appear in the same records:

Anastasia, Antonia, Antonie, Birgován, Boldor, Bone, Bugnariu, Buta, Chimpean, Comșa, Demian, Dumbraian, Fogaras, Fogarasi, Hertia, Hetea, Illegible, Illyes, Inocan, Istrate, Kimpean, Kutiák, Kutián, Lopasán, Lopozan, Macbet, Magyarosi, Mareș, Mariș, Mateas, Mateasiu, Mates, Michael, Mih, Mihocsa, Mihócsa, Moyse, Neameș, Neamțiu, Negrea, Nemesiu, Nicusan, Onisim, Pariat, Percat, Periat, Periet, Perietu, Pestisior, Pop, Puscas, Puscasiu, Puscașu, Pușcaș, Pópá, Rosner, Szabo, Szanislav, Szente, Sălăgean, Tatar, Tritean, Truța, Tătar, Vitályos, Șerban, Șerbán

Occupations#

The direct line runs Plugariu under Petru, Agronom under Ioan, Econom under Vichentie, so the household held land throughout. Several collateral branches slid into Ziler, day labour, which is the sharper social signal in these registers than any of the farming words.

All the data#

Seventy-three people, across the Uiorean, Litean, Tritean and Sanislav families. Dates up to 1918 are Julian, as the parish recorded them, and are given unconverted. Ages copied verbatim from the death register are the basis for every estimated birth date. The last column links to the underlying record on hpdt.ro so anything here can be checked.

The earliest Uioreans in the village#

My three times great-grandparents#

That generation: Petru and Eva’s children, the Litean, Tritean and Sanislav sides, and the women who married in#

My great-grandparents’ generation#

The children born 1906 to 1923, and my grandmother#

What I could not establish#

Stated plainly, so the gaps are not mistaken for conclusions.

• My grandmother’s parents are unknown. Minerva Sanislav is not in hpdt.ro at all, so unlike everyone else here she cannot be attached to a household. Two are possible and neither is provable from these records. And since the Sanislavs came into the village from Veresmort, which hpdt.ro does not transcribe at all, her line runs straight out of the database rather than merely stopping inside it.
• Petru’s parents are unknown. His 1843 marriage record names no parents and no birth record survives for him. The thirteen Uioreans in the first table are almost certainly his father, uncles and cousins, but the records do not say which. Iacov, born around 1783, and Mihail are the plausible candidates on age alone.
• Whether Toma and Georgie Tritean were brothers is unproven, and it is the one fact that would fix how closely the family is related to bishop Lucian Triteanu. Toma’s death record names no father, and hpdt.ro’s marriage entries carry no parent fields at all, so the two households cannot be joined from these registers. If they were brothers, the bishop was my great-great-grandmother’s first cousin.
• The parish spellings never reached print. Searches for Uiuorean, Uiărean and Ujuorean in Arcanum return nothing. Those forms existed only in the priest’s hand.
• Both surnames are also place names, which makes plain full-text search close to useless for them. Uiorean is the ordinary adjective for Ocna Mureș, and Sanislău is a commune in Satu Mare county. Most archive hits for either word are the place, not a person.
• Nothing on the nineteenth century in the newspapers. Expected: ordinary Transylvanian village farmers did not appear in the press or the gazettes before about 1900.
• Nothing at all on Remus (b. 1909), Victoria (b. 1919) or Ană (b. 1923).
• Two separate lines run into the Veresmort parish, which hpdt.ro does not hold at all: Maria Periat, my great-great-grandmother, was born there, and so were the Sanislav men. That parish, and its Greek Catholic books as much as its Orthodox ones, is the biggest single gap here.
• Some records are duplicated in the source. Haralampie’s 1891 death appears twice, Iacov’s 1848 death twice, the 1814 Mih marriage twice. I have kept both ids in each case rather than picking one.
• One record contradicts the rest. Ioan’s 1912 death record calls him lutheran where every other record in his life has him orthodox. Most likely a slip of the pen.
• On my mother’s side, almost everything. Ana Antohi’s parents, my great-grandfather on the Antohi side, whether Ana was born a Teorean at all, which Ivești her brother was mayor of, whether the Conț of Dipșa and the Conț of Aiud and Teiuș are one family, and why any of them are buried in Roman Catholic ground. That section says which document would answer each.

If I were to carry on, there would be two obvious next steps. The Războieni-Cetate civil registers after 1923, which are not in hpdt.ro, would settle my grandmother’s birth and parents and the date of my grandparents’ marriage. And the Veresmort (Unirea) parish registers, which hpdt.ro does not hold either, are where both of the lines that leave the village end up: Maria Periat’s, and the Sanislavs’. For those, ask under Vințul de Sus as well, since Veresmorț had no communal secretariat of its own between the wars and was administered from there, so the civil registration sat elsewhere than the village’s own name suggests. After that, the pre-1813 Feldioara registers if they survive, which would be in the Alba county archives rather than online, and which would also settle Toma and Georgie Tritean. On my mother’s side it would be the Aiud civil death registers for 1962 and 1964, since a Romanian death entry names the deceased’s parents and birthplace. I am not planning to.

If you are a relative#

If you found your own ancestors on this page, please get in touch. That goes for anyone descended from the Uiorean, Uioreanu, Ujvári, Litean, Liptai, Tritean (Triteanu) or Sanislav (Sanislau, Lup) families of Feldioara Săcuiască, and equally for the families who married into them: Buta, Periat, Boldor, Demian, Tatar, Pușcaș, Nemesiu, Bugnariu, Popa, Costoiu, Istrate, Neamțiu, Comșa, Mareș, Șerban, Dumbraian, Magyarosi, Fogarasi, Hertia, Chimpean, Antonie and Hetea.

On my mother’s side, that goes for the Conț of Dipșa and of Aiud and Teiuș under any of their spellings, Conț, Cont, Koncz, Kontz and Konc, and for the Antohi and Antohe of Lechința, and for the Teorean and Teoreanu of Ivești in Galați. There I am short of almost everything, so anything at all would help.

If you descend from the Triteans of Feldioara I would particularly like to hear from you, because one question there is open: whether Toma Tritean, born about 1828, and Georgie Tritean, born about 1839, the bishop’s father, were brothers.

I am not maintaining a family tree and I am not collecting anybody’s personal details. But I have working notes considerably fuller than this page, including the raw records, and I am glad to share them with someone who turns out to be family. Corrections are even more welcome than additions. Somebody’s grandmother almost certainly remembers something that would settle a question I have marked here as unresolved.