I've mentioned before that many couples in Austria-Hungary never civilly registered their marriages, or only registered them years after the fact. These couples had religious weddings, and their communities considered them fully married, but the government considered their children to be illegitimate, and therefore they were given their mothers' surnames. Multiple successive generations of religious-only marriages could have a major impact on surnames used by children--and sometimes full siblings within the same family would use different surnames. Without accounting for this, you could miss records and full branches of your family. Here's how this phenomenon manifested itself in one family.
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| Judesz Stober/Kaufman Birth; 1892 |
