About me
I'm Zsófia (Sophie) Šindýlková, a psychologist, a genealogist, a wife and a mother. During my university years while studying psychology I soon realized that I'm mostly interested in couple and family therapy. Learning more about my own family, understanding family dinamics is a very crucial part of specializing in this field of psychology. Therefore I started step-by-step to research my own ancestors by collecting basic information, pictures, family stories and personal memories. The more time I spent with this 'work', the more I realized how fascinating it is. Shortly my initial interest turned into a real passion. Since then through deligient research I was able to find information for thousands of ancestors of mine to more than 10 generations - working on both my lineal as well as my collateral ancestors. Up to today it brings me great joy whenever I can find a new person, a new piece of information, a picture or a personal story.
My research in numbers
- More than 5 years experience
- Collecting appr. 2500 old family pictures and digitalizing them
- Oldest picture taken in 1915, portraying 3 generation of my maternal ancestors
- Picture of my third-great grandma who was born in 1852
- Collecting 522 newspaper articles about my ancestors' obituary, marriage announcement and other important life events
- Finding appr. 50 new living relatives in Hungary and abroad
- Collecting 6 letters written by my great-grandpa about his experiences as prisoner of war after World War II
- Visting more than 10 cemeteries in Hungary and abroad
- Finding 68 graves of my ancestors
- Finding information about more thousand of ancestors
- Researching back to 8-10 generations
- Finding the earliest ancestors from 1630 (13. generation)
- Browsing more thousand digitalized registers
- Visiting archives multiple times
- Countless hours of searching
My most exciting discovery
Thanks to the research of the past years, I found out that my great-grandmother's siblings and parents - with the exception of my great-grandmother - were deported from Hungary to Germany after World War II. The separated family kept in touch with each other through letters and photos, which have survived to this day. Many eventually continued their journey to the United States of America and settled down here. After a long time of research, I had the opportunity to find the living descendants of these family members and get in touch with them through social media. This year I had the privilege of meeting them personally. Although we met for the first time in person and had only known each other for a short time thanks to conversations online, we greeted each other like old family members and had the opportunity to share with each other photos, memories, personal experiences, this way expanding our knowledge of our common ancestors.
Organizing my findings
I pondered a lot about the most practical and useful way of storing the information, photos, letters, registers and data that I collected over the past years. Although all information with regards to my ancestors can be found in the online family history system - which I use for my research - showing this data to relatives is not very practical. After much of thinking, I decided that in order to organize the information and make it easier to show it to family members, I would gather all the information, pictures, and letters separately for my maternal and paternal ancestors in one-one folder. Although there is always new data to add to the current version, I am proud to show my family members the following folders.