Eighth Generation

128. [Progenitor] BERECZ was born (date unknown). Berecz Family Line Information:

The Berecz family is an ancient noble family of Hungary, believed to originate in the Transylvanian village of Bereczk -- now Bretçu, Romania. The village likely was named for St. Brectius of Tours (in Hungarian St. Bereczk) an 11th century missionary to the Székely peoples of Transylvania.

Current variations of the name include Bereczk, Bereczki, and Bereczky. Prior to the 1830's, our name was usually spelled Börötzk with many variations -- and in the latter part of the 19th century it was sometimes spelled Berec. These various spellings were used interchangeably in accordance with the custom of the time. For this family history, the standard spelling of "Berecz" is used throughout. The "cz" is pronounced as the English "ts" -- therefore Berecz is pronounced "Beh-rets."

If we believe Endre Németh's "History of the Berecz Family" more than a century passed between the arrival of three Transylvanian Berecz brothers in western Hungary, and the beginning of definitive records. These brothers are said to have fought in the 1599 recapture of Györ from the Turks after which they settled in western Hungary, at which time they proved their noble heritage. We find our branch of the Berecz' early in the 18th century not far from the Rába river, as landowners -- "gazda" -- with vineyards on the slopes of the extinct volcano called Sághegy. [Some distant Berecz relatives still own small vineyards there.] For whatever reason, the church records no longer identified them as part of the Magyar nobility.

Following Joseph II's Edict of Toleration in 1781, and the reopening of the Evangelical (Lutheran) churches, many of the men (and later women) of our Berecz line served as Evangelical pastors and teachers in Vas, Sopron, Veszprém and Zala counties. Over the years, the conventions regarding identification of the social status of individuals in church registers changed. Several of these individuals were identified as "Nemzetes" (abbreviated Nz) which means "the honorable" and was intended as a title of respect, rather than of nobility.

We do not have definitive evidence that the group of Berecz families living in Ság and producing children in the 1730's and 1740's (when the first reasonably complete baptismal records occur) were all siblings. It seems highly likely though (due to the role of a marriage witness ... a job usually reserved for an uncle) that Benedek, János, and Márton were brothers, and probably all were "cousins." All are shown here in order to put some perspective on the size of the Berecz family in Ság at that time, and to demonstrate some of the earliest indicators of the many links between the Berecz, Zsámboki, Somogyi, Hanzsér, Meszterházi and other families -- which even today provide living testimony of our family's historical role in the Ság area.

Children were: