How to find a church in Hungary or Mukacheve, Ukraine?

Question:I am trying to locate churches in Szabolcs - Szatmar - Bereg megye (county) in Hungary, and also Munkacs (Mukacheve, Ukraine). I am looking for churches that would have been in exsitence from mid 1800's until at least early 1900's. We believe they were Eastern Rite Catholic (Byzantine Catholic) because that is the church my grandmother was baptized.

Are there any websites or resources available? I've googled and searched online with no luck.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I am trying to locate churches in Szabolcs - Szatmar - Bereg megye (county) in Hungary, and also Munkacs (Mukacheve, Ukraine). I am looking for churches that would have been in exsitence from mid 1800's until at least early 1900's. We believe they were Eastern Rite Catholic (Byzantine Catholic) because that is the church my grandmother was baptized.

Are there any websites or resources available? I've googled and searched online with no luck.

The way to approach this is from three different angles. It's unlikely, though not impossible, that anyone from Hungary was a Byzantine Catholic. Hungary was distinctly Latin rite because it was under the control of the Holy Roman Emperor. The Ukraine is a bigger thicket of thorns, but we'll get to that in a minute.

Hungarian records are in good shape. But what's missing in your question is which town you need a parish in. Searching an entire diocese or archdiocese is daunting. I think this is a link to the right archdiocese. My suggestion to you is to first exhaust all avenues (particularly naturalization records) to narrow down your search to a particular town. It's far easier to write 4 letters in Hungarian to 4 parishes than it is to send to 340 parishes in an entire archdiocese.

Mukacheve is a little trickier. I would suggest you take a couple of days to get a good understanding of what happened between the Roman Catholic Church and the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches that led to the Byzantine rite and the Ukranian Orthodox Church. The reason, simply enough, is that it was almost church by church and town by town that people decided to leave the RCC or the GOC to join the Byzantine rite or form the UOC. Spend a day at a really good library and overlay your town in a religious gazetteer before coming to any conclusions about which church they belonged to. It's quite possible that your grandmother was baptized in the Byzantine rite of the Catholic Church because there wasn't a Ukranian Orthodox church in the area and her parents wouldn't dare set foot in a Russian Orthodox church.

Once you get a feel for the area, email me with what you've found and I'll be happy to look up the various churches or dioceses in the area that might be able to help you. There are some shortcuts available to you (particularly through some resources in Chicago) that can make it easier to get information out of the Ukraine, especially after the fall of Communism.