A SMELLER FAMILY STORY

By Carl John Smeller

June, 2020

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Born in 1943 during World War II, I spent my childhood living in a two-story frame house on 24^th Street in Barberton, Ohio with my parents, Lloyd and Magdalene, and four siblings, Paul, George, Joan, and Donald. We shared this home with our father’s parents who lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor. Their names were Ladislaus (Laszlo, Lloyd) and Ethel (Etel) Smeller and they were from “the old country”, Hungary, to be specific. We spent little time with them; did not share meals together; and did not socialize with them. I do not know why.

Perhaps their broken English created this social barrier. Both grandparents spoke Hungarian to our father, Laszlo Jr. (Lloyd Jr.) but not to our mother, Magdalene, who, as far as we knew did not speak or understand that language. Both of Mom’s parents immigrated to the United States from Hungary, too, but they spoke German in their Hungarian village. Grandma spoke to her downstairs grandchildren in very fractured English, but well enough to be understood.

A common front door served as an entry portal to family and visitors both upstairs and down. An open stairway a few feet to the right of this door lead to Grandpa and Grandma’s domicile. Curiosity would get the best of me, and I would crawl or scramble up those steps to investigate what went on up there. I cannot ever remember being turned away, and I invariably ended up seated on a stiff chair at their kitchen table eating foods that were not served at the table downstairs. The drink was always coffee served with an abundance of cream and sugar. Grandma baked her own bread and the heavenly odors that wafted downstairs were most likely the trigger that led me to her kitchen in the first place. Dunking her bread in the coffee cup before eating was the accepted practice, and it was delicious. Memories of noodles and sausages still run through my head.

Our family attended Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church in Barberton. It was one of a half-dozen Catholic churches in a town of 30,000 souls. Holy Trinity, founded in 1911 by Hungarian immigrants, served the Hungarian families who settled into the town. Others were welcomed, but Hungarians dominated. In addition to a Hungarian language Mass, the church members celebrated an annual autumn harvest festival. I recall having to learn folk dances, being dressed in Hungarian traditional garb, and performing in front of beer-drinking adults at this event. I will never forget the food I ate there, tasty Hungarian fare cooked up by the Hungarian ladies. It was wonderful, especially the sausages!

During the years we grew into adulthood, we heard little about

“the old country” and life there; the reason for coming to “Amerika”; or the process of establishing a family in the new world. Only much later in life did I develop an urge to discover the origins of our Smeller family. Others in the family have delved into our heritage as well and have shared their findings with me. Thankfully, some records have been preserved despite the fact that Laszlo, Ethel and all their children have departed this earth. Notes taken during interviews with aged aunts, a box of time-yellowed letters from the old country, and public records available on genealogy websites have been important in researching this paper. Reading two books on the history of Hungary helped my understanding of the rich culture of the people of that nation. A recent trip to Ravazd, Hungary, the town where our grandparents were born, raised, married and began their family was instructive. Meeting a group of Hungarian Smellers at a lunch in Budapest was mindblowing and emotional. Eating real Hungarian food for three straight days was wonderful, especially the sausages.

This paper is an attempt to organize and reveal what I have gleaned and experienced using my Grandfather, Laszlo, as the focus. Hopefully, it will bring some clarity to the reader about our family’s foundations. I do not pretend to be a writer, historian, or genealogist, so forgive me if you find errors or omissions. If you are interested in the story, please feel free to contribute and correct. Let us all make this a work-in-progress just like the Smeller family.

SMELLER? You can’t be serious!

It is an unusual name, so we will start here and clarify its origins. Family lore has it that some cruel US Immigration worker changed the name when the family was processed through Ellis Island. This is not true. In fact the name was changed but in Hungary sometime in the nineteenth century. The original name was Schmeller. It looks and sounds German because it is, most likely Bavarian from Southern Germany. Prior to the nineteenth century Hungary suffered under the occupation of the Ottoman Turks who had enslaved or killed one-fourth of Hungary’s citizens. Once the Ottoman’s were defeated and driven out, the landowners needed workers for their farmlands. In the seventeenth century a call went out to German citizens for farm help, and hundreds of thousands of laborers responded.

The Danube River originates in the Black Forrest of southern Germany and flows east and south through Hungary and then to the Black Sea. Any Bavarian who wanted a farm job in Hungary would merely hop on a boat and float to Hungary for employment. Some of these immigrants brought with them the surname of Schmeller. All Schmellers were not farm laborers. Google the name and you will find mostly Bavarians with the same name. Johann Andreas Schmeller (1785-1852) for example, was a German version of Noah Webster. He wrote dictionaries and did research on the modern Bavarian language. Johann Joseph Schmeller was a nineteenth century portraitist who painted high-placed German citizens including the poet and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

By 1868 a number of Schmellers lived in Hungary. In this year during a swelling of nationalistic fervor, the national government passed a law requiring all citizens who possessed non-Hungarian names to “Hungarianize” their name, that is, to legally change the spelling. About one million German-named citizens complied. Schmeller became Smeller. Why? Because, in the Hungarian language an “s” is pronounced “sch”, so the “ch” was dropped. Quite simply, the spelling changed but the Hungarian pronunciation did not.

A visit to the town cemetery in Ravazd, Hungary reveals

“Schmeller” headstones placed side-by-side with their

“Smeller” loved ones. Baptismal records held in the Catholic Church in Hungary reveal our ancestors’ names back many generations with “Smeller” as their spelling. (Anecdotally, when I checked into our hotel in Budapest, I presented my credit card to the front desk clerk and asked the man to pronounce my name. Without skipping a beat, he said

“schmeller”).

A Brief History of Hungary

Here’s a rough timeline for this ancient country:

First Millennium AD Roman Empire and invaders

1000 -1240 Arpad Dynasty

1240 -1300 Mongol Invasion

1300 -1500 Ottoman Invasion

1500 -1867 Habsburg Monarchy

1867 -1918 Austria-Hungary

1918 -1941 Political chaos

1941 -1945 Nazi Germany control

1945 -1989 Communist Russia control

1989 -Present Parliamentary Democratic Republic

In the first half of the first millennium the lands now belonging to the Hungarian people were controlled by the Roman Empire. They called the province Pannonia. Roman domination lasted until the invasion of the Huns around 400AD. It is important to note that the Huns arrived from Asia and were not the forefathers of the modern Hungarians. For the next 400 years control of the land fell to various competing nomadic peoples including Goths and Visigoths. Then the Magyars arrived in about 900AD. These were the original Hungarians.

Magyars were tribal peoples who pushed down from the Ural Mountains of Siberia in the northeast. Seven Magyar tribes stormed through what is now central Europe all the way into today’s Italy, wreaking havoc and plundering communities as they went. Eventually, they settled in the Carpathian Basin (Pannonia) or modern day Hungary. The Magyars were Christianized in the 10^th Century and the Christian Kingdom of Hungary was established in 1000AD.

Anointed King on December 25, 1000, Steven of the Arpad tribe was the son of the supreme Magyar chieftain, Geza. King Steven had been baptized as a Christian and in 996BC was married to Gisele, a daughter of Duke Henry II of Bavaria. Thus, over one thousand years ago the first Hungarian ruler brought a Bavarian woman and her Bavarian entourage (knights, servants etc.) into Hungary to be his Queen. Steven I and Gisela ruled for 38 years, and he is now the Patron Saint of Hungary. The Magyars brought their language with them, and it has been the language of the Hungarians still today.

Speaking Hungarian

Learning to speak, write and understand the language of the Magyars is a challenge for anyone including resettled Bavarian farm laborers. The language is not like that of any of its neighboring countries and has the reputation among linguists of being among the most challenging languages in the world. Finnish is its next most similar language. The Magyars explain this by joking that when their forefathers rode in to Europe, they split into two forces, one group heading west carrying the vowels to Finland and the other cohort to Hungary with the consonants. As for our Smellers, they dropped the Bavarian tongue and embraced the language of the Magyars.

Currently, no more that thirteen million people in the world speak Hungarian. That Hungary sits in the midst of nations whose citizens each speak a different language, and, considering that Hungary was dominated by a multitude of foreigners over many centuries, it is amazing that the Hungarian language survives. Hungarians are now and have always been proud of their language. They have nurtured it, protected it, and passed it on from generation to generation like a national treasure.

Home Sweet Home?

Ravazd. That’s the name of the small village where the Schmellers settled to perform mostly farm work for Hungarian landowners. It sits just south of the Danube River a mere ninety miles from two major world capitals, Vienna to the west and Budapest to the east. Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, is a short sixty-five miles to the north. Ravazd is a community with about 1200 people in Gyor-Moson-Sopron County in the most northwestern section of Hungary set into beautiful rolling countryside dominated by agriculture. Hungary has for centuries been considered the breadbasket of Europe.

Ravazd and the area surrounding it hold many deeply historic religious and secular sites that are important to the Hungarian people. Travel from Ravazd twenty miles to the northwest and one arrives in the beautiful, historic medieval town of Gyor. This walled city was named the very first Diocese of Hungary by no less than King Steven I. Between Gyor and Ravazd sits Pannonhalma Archabbey, a World Heritage site. A massive

Benedictine monastery sitting high on a protective hill, Pannonhalma is a walled fortress overlooking the fertile farm plain below. It is the second largest territorial abbey in the world and was founded in 996 by Prince Geza, the father of King Steven I. In fact King Steven was born and resided a mere seventy miles to the east. He donated land and special privileges to the monastery. In the late Eleventh Century King Ladislaus I donated the village of Ravazd to the Abbey.

Sometime during the Ottoman invasion of Hungary, Ravazd was entirely destroyed by the occupying Turks. In the Eighteenth Century Hungarian serfs repopulated the town. The Germans who moved to Ravazd in the following century were not wealthy and came to work the lands of the Abby and the landed gentry in the valley. Ravazd was then and is now a farm town with its own Catholic church, cemetery, and general store with a restaurant. Homes in the neighborhood are modest but well kept. The town is tidy, quiet and relatively prosperous. The cemetery sits on a rather steep hillside just outside of town and holds many Schmeller and Smeller gravesites. Modest headstones display names with birthdates dating back to the Eighteenth Century.

Are Smellers German or Hungarian?

Of the million or so Germans who came into Hungary to work on the farms, many chose to live in communities where they retained their language and customs. Not so in Ravazd. Living in the heart of an historic, Catholic, rural population, they assimilated rapidly. The men married Hungarian women and learned to speak their language.

More than one Smeller man married a woman with the surname of Horvath, the second most common Hungarian name. Grandpa Laszlo married Ethel Horvath. His father, Pal (Paul), lost his first wife, Anna, and remarried Erzsebet

Horvath. Laszlo’s grandfather, also named Laszlo, married Orzo Horvath. The Horvath name is as much the fabric of our heritage as is the name Smeller. By the dawning of the Twentieth Century, Smellers were quite simply Hungarians with a Germanic sounding last name.

Life in Ravazd

Laszlo Smeller was born in Ravazd on March 23, 1871 to Pal and Anna (Makra) Smeller. He had a brother, Marton, who was four years older. In 1887 his mother, forty-eight year old Anna died. Laszlo was sixteen when his mother passed away. One year later his father remarried Erszebet and started a new family. Coincidentally, during the entirety of Laszlo’s childhood, all of Europe was suffering through what is now known as The Long Depression (1873-1896). This period was especially difficult for farm workers whose livelihood had already been negatively impacted by the advent of automated farm equipment. In short, jobs were scarce and Laszlo was one of the young farm laborers looking for work.

Laszlo married Ethel Horvath on February 2, 1898. She was born in Ravazd to Janos (John) and Elizabeth (Balog) Horvath in 1878, and was eight years younger than her husband. By mid-November of ’98 Ethel delivered a baby boy into the world, and they named him Sandor (Alexander). Two years later Lajos (Louis) arrived in November of 1900. Tragedy struck the family in the summer of 1901 when Sandor was found drowned in a rain barrel. Anna was born in June of 1905, and Ilona came into the world in 1910. All four children were born in Ravazd, and Sandor is buried there.

In order to provide for himself and his family, Laszlo began commuting to America. Family lore has it that he sailed three times to work, save and return with cash to survive. During this exact period, guest workers were permitted into the USA, but a contract required each worker to return to his place of origin after six months. Research reveals proof that Laszlo came at least one time. A manifest for a passenger ship called “The Koln” that sailed out of Bremen, Germany on April 11, 1902 and docked in New York City on April 28 details the names of the almost two thousand passengers. On the “List or Manifest of Alien Immigrants” can be found “Marton Horvath, Istvan Horvath and Laszlo Smeller”, all from “Ravazd, Hungary” and listed as “laborers”. By this time Laszlo had been married for four years, had lost his first-born son only months before, and left Ethel and one-year old Louis back in Ravazd. There is no question that he came to work in the USA. Times were tough.

Coming to America

By 1910 Laszlo and Ethel decided to set sail for the USA. Almost 700,000 Hungarians had left their homeland in the previous decade, looking for a new opportunity. In the decade beginning 1910 another 600,000 would leave, among them the Laszlo Smeller family from Ravazd. Again, family lore says that Ethel was not happy with an absent husband while she tried to hold together a family that by 1910 included three small kids. Thus, during a twenty-year period, more than 1.3 million

Hungarians came to America for economic opportunities.

Some returned, but almost all stayed and made a life in the USA. Coincidentally, in all the decades that followed 1920, no more than 30,000 Hungarians immigrated to the USA in any single decade.

The family boarded the White Star Liner “Lapland” out of

Antwerp, Belgium and arrived safely on Ellis Island, NYNY on May 16. The Ellis Island passenger list for this ship reveals that an Immigration official did misspell our name. Smeller appears as “Shmeller”, but someone has modified the name with a pencil or pen line drawn through the “h”. Further, Ethel’s name was misspelled as “Edel”. So, ironically, our name was almost changed to a third iteration of the spelling. Smeller remained Smeller.

Most immigrant families coming to the USA during the early part of the Twentieth Century were required to have a “sponsor”, someone who would oversee the family’s welfare, get them settled into a community, and help them with employment. The name of the Smeller family sponsor has not yet been discovered, but that person had contacts in Northeast Ohio. The family started out in Bedford, Ohio, a community southeast of Cleveland with Laszlo working at Best Foundry Co. as a laborer. He worked there for less than two years, and then moved the family to Glenwillow, Ohio, a newly built company town near Bedford. The Austin Powder Co. established the town, and he began to work for this company. What kind of factory work he did for Austin Powder is unknown, but this location produced shotgun shells and small arms ammunition. Laszlo Jr. (Lloyd) was born in Glenwillow on May 3, 1912, the first native-born US citizen of the family.

By 1913 the family started over again, moving to Ashtabula County, Ohio, the most northeastern county in the state.

Settling in Rome Township, a rural community then (and still), Laszlo returned to farm labor to support his brood. Before the next birth, tragedy struck the family again as three-year-old Ilona died from diphtheria on May 3, 1913, her brother Laszlo’s first birthday. According to family reports she is interred at one of the two cemeteries in Orwell, Ohio, a farm town south of their home.

Margaret (1914), Otto (1917), and Elizabeth (1919) all were born in Rome Township. The 1920 Census for Rome Township reveals that the family lived on a farm on Calendar Road. All eight are listed including the six children, ages 19 to 4. Laszlo Sr. claimed “farming-general” as his occupation, but he and his son are now documented as “Ladislaus”. Interestingly, under the column asking whether one spoke English, Ladislaus Sr. replied “yes” but Ethel said “no”. For the better part of their first decade in the USA, they had returned to farming land owned by someone else. They continued to speak Hungarian at home.

By 1922 farm life ended as the family moved to the very industrialized town of Barberton, Ohio near Akron. Records show that they lived at four different addresses including a house at 199 17^th St. NW, a home that they owned. The 1930 Census reveals seven Smellers at this address as, by this time, Anna had married and departed to her own household. The country was six or seven months into the Great Depression by the time of this census, but three members of the household were working in Barberton factories. Now both Ladislaus names have been changed to “Lloyd”. Lloyd Sr. (58 years old) worked at a chemical plant as a “compounder”. Son Louis (29) remained at home and worked in a rubber plant, and Lloyd Jr. (17) worked as a “yard laborer” in a valve plant. Ethel continued to answer “no” to the query about speaking English, twenty years after she had moved to America.

By the 1940 Census, less than two years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Smellers had purchased and moved into another home at 232 24^th St. NW in Barberton. They, also, bought an empty lot at the end of the street, one that became a garden for Ethel. Presumably, the family prospered during the Depression. This census shows six family members living at this house as Louis had married and moved out. By 1940 all family members were adults. Elizabeth, the youngest, was twenty. This census, for the first time ever, inquires about each person’s income. Lloyd Sr. is 69 years old and working at the same chemical plant but now as a janitor. Lloyd Jr. (29), Margaret (25), and Otto (23) were all working. As a group, these four wage earners combined for a household income of more than $4500. In 2020 dollars that is more than $83,000.

This 1940 Census now ends my narrative about the journey of the Smeller family. Anna and Louis have married and moved on with their lives. The Great Depression ends with the advent of World War II. More family stories are yet to follow as all of Laszlo and Ethel’s children create their own lives. Laszlo Sr. passed away in 1949 and Ethel in 1962 still residing at the home on 24^th Street. They brought eight children into the world with six surviving them. I will leave their stories to their descendants.

Epilogue

My brothers and sister have travelled to many American cities all around the USA. We have had a habit of looking in phone books with the purpose of finding the Smeller name presented somewhere else in this great country. The search was mostly futile. With the advent of the Internet search engine, personal computing, and genealogy websites, the Smeller name can be found in other states. These few families are not our descendants. None of them have their origins in Hungary, so they cannot be relatives. How they got the name is not for me to answer, but with their origins in Scotland, the Netherlands and Russia, they must have their own story.

My eldest son, Curt, began using Facebook and “friended” two Smellers in Hungary. He reported that Lilla and Nikoletta had family origins back in Ravazd. The three of them correctly reasoned that, somehow, they must be related. About the same time, I joined a genealogy website called Heritage.com. Within fifteen minutes of opening the site, I was staring at a family tree created by Balas Gyozo Smeller. Hanging on the tree was Laszlo, Ethel, and all their children. Bingo! It turns out that Balasz is one of Lilla and Nikolleta’s cousins. All of this was a precursor to a lunch meeting with an envoy of American Smellers with Hungarian Smellers at an Italian restaurant in a park along the Danube River in Budapest.

Again, technology assisted in bringing about this meet-up. Contact information was shared, and a series of e-mails made it easy. We would be in Budapest to begin a Danube River cruise, so we arranged to arrive a few days early, gave them the dates we were available, and asked that they choose the location and time and bring as many relatives as they could find who were interested in meeting us. We taxied to the site, and, upon arriving early (on purpose), realized that the Hungarian Smellers had reserved a table for at least twenty-five. There were only six of us…did someone make a mistake? Nope. We saw a party of about twenty men, women and children strolling up to the entrance to the restaurant.

Our common relative was Pal, our grandfather Laszlo’s dad. Pal remarried Erzsebet Horvath one year after the death of his wife and Laszlo’s mother, Anna. Erzsebet and Pal had a son, Pal Jr., born in 1895, and these were his offspring. Pal Jr. was Laszlo’s half-brother, and it is not known how closely connected they were. We know for certain that they grew up in different households, and that they were born twenty-four years apart. In fact, Pal was only three when Laszlo married Ethel and started his own family. Regardless, they all grew up in the small town of Ravazd.

Our lunch lasted almost four hours and had the feeling of a family reunion. All the women and children and some of the men spoke English. The language is part of their school curriculum and the Hungarians get a steady diet of English-speaking entertainment. They get plenty of practice. The women are outgoing, creative and engaging personalities, and arts-and-craft pursuers. The men are analytic types with engineering and construction dominating their trade choice. They were very interested in our life in America but could not imagine living outside of Hungary. They questioned how any Hungarian could leave and start a new life elsewhere.

We learned that no Smeller from Pal’s lineage lives in Ravazd any longer. The last one had gotten up in years and had been moved to be closer to relatives in another city. In fact, we found a headstone in the Ravazd cemetery for “Erzsebet Smeller” born in 1930 with no date of death. This may be reserved for the Smeller in question. We parted company with affectionate goodbyes, but we continue to meet up on Facebook from time-to-time. Eating pizza and drinking beer beside the Danube with long-lost relatives on a beautiful spring day was very special. Italian food in Hungary is pretty good. The pizza contained pepperoni, so at least we had some sausage.

Follow Up

To review the most recent Smeller Family Tree feel free to visit the website created by Donald Smeller. Included too are documents and photos located here.