My Baba, Suzanna Csornej-Maczko, was born in Nemecka Poruba in 1896. Poruba sits in the northeast part of the Hungarian Plain, just south of the Vihorlat Peak in the Carpathian Range. The village was located in the old Hungarian county called Ung, and belonged to the Greek Catholic Parish of Jovsa--Jovsa was one mile west of Poruba, but Poruba had its own church.
Baba's father, Michael Csornej-Maczko was, like everyone else, a farmer, but he was also a village biros, Hungarian for magistrate. He died in 1904, probably of pneumonia, when Baba was only 8 years old. Her mother, Anna Ihnat-Mikula, is thought to have died of a heart attack, as she was discovered dead in her bed one morning, only three years after Michael died.
By the time she was 15 (1911), Baba knew her future would be severely limited if she stayed in Poruba, so she took what little money she had saved, along with what money was received from the sale of her father's land, and left for America. Six months after arriving at her brother Michael's house in Snowden, Pennsylvania, she was married to John Bubnash, a Valaskovce native who had lived in Poruba previous to immigrating to America.
Future posts will give details about Nemecka Poruba, and I welcome information, insight, and comments from others with Poruba roots.
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