meaning of the name "Personey"?

Question:I think the name was originally pronounced Par-shone-lee or Par-jone-lee. I have no idea what the spelling was. But an ancestor from Hungary came over and changed to name or it was changed for him.

What does it mean? Where in Hungary did it come from?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I think the name was originally pronounced Par-shone-lee or Par-jone-lee. I have no idea what the spelling was. But an ancestor from Hungary came over and changed to name or it was changed for him.

What does it mean? Where in Hungary did it come from?

If it was originally a Hungarian name, it's been pretty thoroughly mangled. The -ee ending, which would be spelled -i or -y in a Hungarian name, suggests a locative byname, which is a byname based on the name of a place. (The suffix means 'from, of'.)

I'm not finding any likely places starting with P-vowel-r-sibilant, but if I assume the 'r' is an American addition, then you're not too far from Pozsonyi, which is pronounced roughly /PO-zho-nyee/, with /o/ like in 'go', /zh/ like the 's' in 'measure', and /ny/ like Spanish n-tilde. Pozsony is the Hungarian name of Bratislava.

Other possibilities: P?sz?nyi (from a village in Vas county), Pazonyi (from Nyírpazony, a place in Szabolcs-Szatmár county near Nyíregyháza), Pereszlényi (from a town in modern-day Slovakia), or maybe Peresznyei (from a place in Vas county).

I think you'll need to dig up some pre-immigration forms of the name to come up with anything more definite.

Sources:
Kázmér Miklós: _Régi Magyar családnevek szótára_. Magyar Nyelvtudományi Társaság, Budapest, 1993.

Kiss Lajos: _F?ldrajzi nevek etimológiai szótára_. Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 1997.

The very few listed in ancestry.com are from either Hungary or Ireland. No meaning or origin other than that is known.