{"id":8891,"date":"2026-08-04T11:00:46","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T09:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iratmentoalapitvany.hu\/?page_id=8891"},"modified":"2026-08-26T14:43:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T12:43:08","slug":"from-the-balaton-highlands-to-the-diamond-mines-of-the-congo-or-the-secret-of-the-banana-box","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/iratmentoalapitvany.hu\/en\/from-the-balaton-highlands-to-the-diamond-mines-of-the-congo-or-the-secret-of-the-banana-box\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Balaton Highlands to the Diamond Mines of the Congo \u2013 or, the Secret of the Banana Box"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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At one of the spring 2026 auctions, the Hungarian Heritage Archives Foundation purchased a small noble family archive contained in a banana box. It became clear already <\/span>during the preliminary inspection that the completely unarranged collection could hardly be described as “sensational.” Nevertheless, we considered it worthy of preservation because of its significance for local history. Following the successful bid, however, one surprise followed another. What had begun as a banana box full of documents ultimately developed into a “document rescue pilot project.” In the following pages, the reader will find an account of the archive and its history, the investigation into its former owners, and, through the search for documents removed from the archive, an illustration of the differing perspectives of the art market and public collections.<\/p>\n

The “Hunt” for the Documents<\/h4>\n

At the auction in question, the Foundation purchased two lots. The first was the small archive described above, which at first glance appeared to be the family archive of the P\u00e9terffy family, a lesser noble family from Nemesgul\u00e1cs in Zala County, today part of Veszpr\u00e9m County. Closer examination, however, revealed that it also contained certain papers of their relatives, the E\u0151ry family, as well as individual written records relating to several other noble families of the Balaton Highlands. The second acquisition was a manuscript volume of nearly seven hundred pages dating from the eighteenth century, consisting chiefly of two sets of minutes relating to the decades-long litigation over the division of the Kisfaludy family estates, to which several charters concerning entirely unrelated matters had subsequently been attached with thread. From the twentieth-century “bookmarks” inserted into the volume (one bearing the name P\u00e9terffy<\/em>) and from the contents of the attached charters, it soon became clear that the two lots had originally belonged together. Indeed, there can be little doubt that the volume had been removed from the banana box in order <\/span>to be sold separately. At this point we began to suspect that further lots offered at the auction might also have been separated from the box containing the archive. Using the auction catalogue, this suspicion was quickly confirmed: we identified a further ten lots that were clearly connected with the P\u00e9terffy, E\u0151ry, and Dobosy families, the last of which appeared both in the banana box and in the manuscript volume.<\/p>\n

This illustrates particularly well the entirely understandable difference in perspective between, on the one hand, public collections and historical researchers, and, on the other, commercial interests. <\/span>For archives, as well as for local and family historians, the essential consideration is that an archival collection should remain intact and be available for research in one place\u2014not only because this facilitates research, but also because, beyond the literal contents of the documents themselves, their relationship to one another conveys a wealth of additional information, the principle known as archival provenance. By contrast, private owners and collectors who place archival material on the market, together with the auction houses responsible for its sale, are naturally interested in achieving the highest possible financial return. For this reason, they frequently divide collections into individual lots and attempt to sell the documents separately, thereby risking the permanent loss of information relating to their archival provenance. The more extensively an archive is divided into separate lots, the greater the likelihood of attracting buyers willing to place higher bids\u2014and the more completely the once coherent archival
collection is dispersed.<\/p>\n

We therefore realised too late that, in order to preserve the integrity of the archive, we should also have bid on the additional lots. Some damage limitation nevertheless proved possible. Two of the twelve lots remained unsold at the auction, enabling us to purchase them afterwards at the opening price. Fortune also favoured us: three further lots had been acquired by a private collector known to us who, having learned that the documents originally belonged together, generously donated them to the Foundation. After reuniting these seven lots, we proceeded to arrange the archive. As for the remaining five lots\u2014that is, five documents\u2014we can only hope for the generosity of their present owners, should this article ever come to their attention. For the time being, our knowledge of their contents is limited to the one-sentence descriptions provided in the auction catalogue.<\/p>\n

It is worth asking according to what principles these documents were selected for separate sale. Naturally, those items that appeared particularly attractive in either form or content were offered individually, although in this case the archive contained no truly exceptional pieces\u2014such as medieval charters or original grants of arms\u2014that might have attracted particularly high prices. The manuscript volume was undoubtedly the most valuable item in the collection, if only because of its size. In addition, the older documents (including the earliest, dating from 1596), original or contemporary copies of title deeds and other legal instruments (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries), minutes of meetings of common landholding associations (though not all of them), records of an inventory character (accounts and probate inventories), and finally a French-language document issued by the Belgian Embassy in Budapest in 1947 were all separated from the archive. According to the publicly available information, the twelve lots had a combined opening price of HUF 204,000 and were eventually sold for HUF 250,500, indicating that they attracted only modest interest. Although the overwhelming majority of the documents remained in the banana box, the former noble family archive would have lost its most valuable pieces. This regrettable loss of archival integrity may serve as a reminder to owners of historical documents that, if they are concerned about the future of the archival material they have inherited or otherwise acquired, they should seek a solution that allows the collection to remain intact. As a first step, they should consider presenting the archive to a public collection or contacting the <\/span>Hungarian Heritage Archives Foundation, which will gladly assist in finding the solution best suited to the owner’s circumstances. Only if neither the institution approached nor the Foundation is able to help should they turn to an auction house.<\/span><\/p>\n

Who Owned the Archive?<\/h4>\n

Following a more thorough examination of the archive, it became evident that the collection acquired its present form during the lifetime of Franciska P\u00e9terffy, wife of Ferenc Heged\u00fcs (1879\u20131961). As the eighth child of a lesser noble family from Nemesgul\u00e1cs, she presumably inherited all or part of the family archive preserved by her father, G\u00e1bor P\u00e9terffy. In a letter written in 1908, one of her distant relatives, Ervin P\u00e9terffy, who lived in Pozsony County, almost certainly addressed G\u00e1bor with the request that he send him, by registered mail, “the family papers preserved in my elder brother’s keeping,” so that he might further elaborate the family’s genealogy. Ervin had learned from other relatives that G\u00e1bor possessed old family documents: “Professor B\u00e9la P\u00e9terffy of the grammar school in Temesv\u00e1r wrote to me that family charters in Latin are kept in a sack in your attic, information which he himself received from his own mother. The widow of Bonif\u00e1c P\u00e9terffy, in turn, heard the same from your wife.” Ervin even offered to provide a deposit for the period during which the documents would remain on loan in his possession.[1]<\/a> Whether this loan ever took place is unknown, just as it remains uncertain to what extent the present archive corresponds to the collection as it existed more than a century ago. Documents may have been removed from the archive on numerous occasions, whether at the time of the proposed loan, following G\u00e1bor’s death, or during the six and a half decades after Franciska’s own death. What is certain is that very little survives from the older, pre-nineteenth-century papers of the P\u00e9terffy family\u2014if, indeed, G\u00e1bor possessed such documents at all. As we shall see, however, the archive was unquestionably enlarged during Franciska’s lifetime.<\/p>\n

Throughout her long life, Franciska lived in several places\u2014Badacsonytomaj, Keszthely, Tapolca, V\u00e1rda in Somogy County, and during the final two decades of her life Szentendre. She became one of the central figures in the Belgian Royal Inheritance Case, discussed below, which attracted considerable attention in the Hungarian press between the two world wars and consequently made her the subject of numerous newspaper articles. One article, published in 1931, remarked that “Mrs Heged\u00fcs \u2026 can prove her distinguished ancestry with an entire suitcase full of dogskin charters. Her family tree reaches back to the reigns of Kings Matthias and Sigismund, and she produces authentic documentary proof for every claim from her suitcase.”[2]<\/a> The last interview with Franciska was conducted in Szentendre in 1948. Describing the family archive, the journalist wrote: “Mrs Ferenc Heged\u00fcs, n\u00e9e Franciska P\u00e9terffy, bustles about while our amazement steadily grows. She takes from her cupboard a worn little suitcase wrapped in blue paper and opens it. The peculiar musty smell of ancient documents greets us. It is a veritable little archive. Centuries-old handwritten folios, family papers dating from the age of King Matthias, grants issued during the reign of Maria Theresa, family trees, and records of inheritance divisions emerge one after another.”[3]<\/a> The article not only portrayed the elderly woman but also reproduced one of the family trees that is still preserved in the archive today. Even if the “family papers dating from the age of King Matthias” may be attributed to journalistic imagination, it is beyond doubt that certain items were removed from the collection at a later date\u2014for example, the reply sent to Franciska by the future Queen Elizabeth II while still heir presumptive, from which the article itself quotes.<\/p>\n

Upon Franciska’s death in 1961, the archive passed to her only surviving child, Karolin Heged\u00fcs, wife of Imre Hatvani. Indeed, the latest documents preserved in the collection, dating from 1965, already relate to her.[4]<\/a> The family lived in Szentendre, at 5 Rab R\u00e1by Square, in a house that also accommodated a candle-making and gingerbread workshop. The business had been established by Franciska’s son, Gyula P\u00e9terfi (1903\u20131957),[5]<\/a> and after his death was taken over by his niece Gizella Hatvani (\u20202015) and her husband Ferenc Balogh (1923\u20131996).[6]<\/a> Both craftsmen were well-known figures in Szentendre. The machinery of Gyula P\u00e9terfi’s workshop, together with the signboard of Ferenc Balogh’s business, is today preserved by the Ferenczy Museum.[7]<\/a> As among the last representatives of the traditional gingerbread-making craft in Hungary, Balogh and his products continued to appear in newspapers well into the 1980s.[8]<\/a> Production ceased only upon Ferenc Balogh’s death.[9]<\/a> It is striking that, with only a few exceptions, their own personal papers are absent from this small archive. We may therefore conclude that what eventually entered the antiquarian market was Franciska P\u00e9terffy’s archive itself, rather than an archive subsequently merged with the papers of her descendants\u2014in other words, the contents of the “worn little suitcase.” The joint grave monument of the P\u00e9terffy, Hatvani, and Balogh families\u2014where Franciska herself is almost certainly buried\u2014may still be found in the Sztaravoda Road Cemetery in Szentendre.[10]<\/a><\/p>\n

The Belgian Royal Inheritance and Franciska P\u00e9terffy<\/h4>\n

Following the death of King Leopold II of Belgium (reigned 1865\u20131909), a remarkable rumour began to circulate in Hungary. It claimed that the king’s wife, Queen Marie Henriette of Belgium (n\u00e9e Archduchess Marie Henriette of Habsburg-Lorraine), who had died seven years earlier and was the daughter of Archduke Joseph, Palatine of Hungary, and Princess Maria Dorothea of W\u00fcrttemberg, had bequeathed an immense fortune to her Hungarian relatives in her last will and testament. According to the reports, the inheritance, amounting to several billion gold francs, comprised not only numerous properties and valuable jewels, but also part of the fabulous wealth of the Belgian Congo, including the revenues of its diamond and gold mines. Hungarian newspapers reported on the ensuing search for the inheritance over several decades, allowing us to reconstruct much of its history. The origins of the story, however\u2014namely, who first spread the extraordinary news and who connected the inheritance with kinship to the Horv\u00e1th family of Szentgy\u00f6rgy\u2014remain obscure. Later newspaper articles explicitly suspected swindlers and “pettifogging lawyers” seeking to enrich themselves through the affair.[11]<\/a> Besides the numerous newspaper reports, Franciska P\u00e9terffy’s archive constitutes one of the most important sources for studying the Belgian inheritance case, whose many ramifications offer a fascinating insight into the society of Transdanubia, particularly its lesser nobility, during the interwar period.<\/p>\n

Still in her early thirties, Franciska had become involved in the Belgian inheritance case from the very beginning, or at the latest by 1912.[12]<\/a> What may have prompted her involvement was her firm conviction that the P\u00e9terffy family was related to the Rh\u00e9dey family: she was able to prove that her great-great-grandmother was named Zsuzsanna R\u00e9dei. Since Countess Claudia Rh\u00e9dey, through her marriage to Duke Alexander of W\u00fcrttemberg, was connected by marriage to the wife of Archduke Joseph, Palatine of Hungary, Franciska regarded the British royal family, descended from Claudia Rh\u00e9dey, as her own relatives as well. In order to establish her claim to the Belgian inheritance, however, she had to prove that she too was descended from Katalin Horv\u00e1th of Szentgy\u00f6rgy, wife of L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Esterh\u00e1zy. In this she also believed herself to have succeeded. One of the P\u00e9terffy ancestors had married a woman of the Raposa family, who on her mother’s side descended from a certain Andr\u00e1s Horv\u00e1th. According to Franciska, this Andr\u00e1s Horv\u00e1th could be demonstrated to be identical with Andr\u00e1s Enyedi, the son whom Katalin Horv\u00e1th had borne to her first husband and who, so the argument ran, had been deprived of the Horv\u00e1th inheritance by the Esterh\u00e1zy family after his mother’s second marriage. In support of this theory, Franciska began collecting extracts from parish and civil registers, certificates, and copies of documents even before the First World War.[13]<\/a> In the end, no one refuted her line of argument; indeed, both the press and the authorities accepted the genealogy she presented as authentic.<\/p>\n

From a modern perspective, however, virtually every element of her argument proves untenable. Although Franciska was indeed descended from a Zsuzsanna R\u00e9dei, there is good reason why this woman cannot be identified within the pedigree of the Counts Rh\u00e9dey: she clearly belonged instead to a lesser noble R\u00e9dei family of Zala County.[14]<\/a> The supposed identity of Andr\u00e1s Enyedi and Andr\u00e1s Horv\u00e1th is even more problematic. As evidence, Franciska relied upon two royal charters issued by King Leopold I in 1695, preserved in the Libri Regii, for which the Hungarian National Archives issued certified copies to her in 1922.[15]<\/a> She had, however, fundamentally misunderstood these documents. According to their text, Andr\u00e1s Enyedi was not the son of Katalin Horv\u00e1th, wife of L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Esterh\u00e1zy, but her brother-in-law, while Katalin herself had only one child from her first marriage, a daughter named M\u00e1ria Enyedi. Moreover, nowhere do the charters suggest that the Enyedi family adopted their mother’s surname, Horv\u00e1th. Franciska usually illustrated her kinship with the Belgian queen by means of a simple pedigree headed by Katalin Horv\u00e1th, from which one branch descended through L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Esterh\u00e1zy and the other through P\u00e1l Enyedi, the Belgian queen appearing at the end of the former branch and Franciska herself at the end of the latter.[16]<\/a> The Esterh\u00e1zy branch, however, was riddled with errors. Queen Marie Henriette was in fact not descended from the Esterh\u00e1zy family and therefore could never have intended to compensate the allegedly disinherited descendants of the Enyedi family. It should nevertheless be borne in mind that, in the period concerned, access to reliable genealogical information was far more limited than it is today.<\/p>\n

Franciska found numerous allies in her arduous pursuit of the inheritance. At first, the research undertaken by the many participating families was coordinated by Mrs G\u00e1bor Raposa of Csurg\u00f3 in Somogy County, but the outbreak of the First World War interrupted the proceedings.[17]<\/a> During the 1920s, Franciska organised the search among the local Horv\u00e1th, Raposa, and P\u00e9terffy families around Tapolca; accordingly, her archive preserves numerous documents and extracts from parish and civil registers relating to all three families.[18]<\/a> The most extensive documentation concerning the inheritance dates from the late 1920s and the 1930s.[19]<\/a> After her financial resources had been exhausted, assistance came from the Nazarene Church, to which both she and her husband belonged. Thanks to this support, she was able to engage lawyers in Belgrade, Switzerland, France, and Belgium, and in 1931 she travelled in person to Paris and Brussels. In the Belgian capital she sought access to the wills of the king and queen, and, with the assistance of interpreters, held discussions both with the notary who kept the wills and with an official of the royal court.[20]<\/a> It later became clear that access to the wills was the decisive issue in the entire case. The Belgian authorities did not dispute the claimants’ alleged kinship with the royal family; their position was simply that the wills contained no bequests whatsoever in favour of Hungarian relatives. Although newspapers were already reporting at the time that the entire case had collapsed,[21]<\/a> neither the participants nor Franciska herself were prepared to accept defeat. At this time, Gyula Gosztonyi, a craftsman from Sopron, emerged as another leading figure among those pursuing the inheritance. He reportedly gathered between 160 and 200 Horv\u00e1th families who believed themselves entitled to a share of the immense fortune. Gosztonyi also travelled to Brussels, where he described the outcome of his negotiations in optimistic terms. In the end, however, he was ruined financially, forced to sell his house in the centre of Sopron, and even became the subject of official proceedings by the Hungarian authorities after collecting money from his fellow claimants to finance the continuation of the case.[22]<\/a> As late as 1947, Franciska still received an official communication from the Belgian Embassy in Budapest stating that no inheritance whatsoever existed in the names of the claimants.[23]<\/a><\/p>\n

The story provided excellent material for the press, not only because of the extraordinary nature of the fabulous inheritance itself and the credulity often attributed to those pursuing it, but also because of the striking contrast between the modest social standing of the claimants and the enormous fortune they hoped to obtain. While many newspapers reported sympathetically on the tireless efforts of Franciska P\u00e9terffy, whom they variously portrayed as a poor smallholder, small landowner, farmer, or peasant woman in a headscarf, other journalists described the affair as a hopeless struggle, often with irony or biting sarcasm directed at those seeking to escape poverty through the promise inheritance. In 1931, for example, the newspaper Keleti \u00dajs\u00e1g<\/em> published an interview with Franciska’s niece living in Belgrade, Mrs Gizella Guzmics Tolics, under the headline A Hungarian Woman in Belgrade Claims Queen Henriette of Belgium’s Five-Hundred-Million Inheritance \u2013 A Hungarian Peasant Family Boasts of Royal Relatives<\/em>. The article placed in the mouth of the caretaker’s wife\u2014who was said to spend her days listening to the radio at home\u2014the remark that “if they receive the inheritance, she will probably become one of the wealthiest women in Central Europe.” It also repeated the family legend according to which the “good Queen Henriette,” while visiting the Tapolca region and, naturally, Gul\u00e1cs in the 1890s, turned to her entourage and declared: “Among these poor peasants I have many relatives.” The article concluded with the following observation: “With these words we take our leave of Mrs Tolics, who returns to her radio\u2026 listening to the stock exchange quotations and calculating how many billions of dinars half a billion Belgian francs would amount to.”[24]<\/a> <\/p>\n

Perhaps the most sarcastic portrayal of Franciska appeared in 1933, when J\u00e1nos N\u00e9meth published an article in newspapers in both Budapest and Bratislava under the title A Poor Elderly Woman from Zala County, Aunt F\u00e1ni P\u00e9terffy, Fights for the Million-Fortune Left by the Wife of King Leopold II of Belgium<\/em>. He characterised the elderly claimant as follows: “It was a great misfortune that Aunt F\u00e1ni could neither read nor write. She had been taken out of school while still a little girl because she had to tend the geese. She remedied this by privately learning her letters from the late schoolmaster of Nemesgul\u00e1cs. Having overcome this first obstacle, she devoted herself to collecting genealogical information. This, too, was no easy task, not least because Aunt F\u00e1ni did not know a single word of any language other than Hungarian. Yet she possessed such a gift for her native tongue that she could have outwitted a dozen lawyers\u2026” After recounting the history of the Belgian inheritance case, the journalist concluded: “What I have written is no fairy tale\u2014but whether the latest turn in the Belgian inheritance affair is equally real, I truly cannot say! One thing is certain: for a simple woman who once tended geese in the valleys below Badacsony as a little girl, Aunt F\u00e1ni carried out such a remarkable campaign in pursuit of the hoped-for Belgian inheritance that everyone in Zala who knew her was astonished. If she is not merely chasing illusions or mirages, then she can only be described as a truly extraordinary woman. This is evident from the way she recites the names on the enormous family tree from memory, as fluently as a bright schoolgirl reciting the multiplication table.”[25]<\/a><\/p>\n

Franciska P\u00e9terffy’s own notes preserved in her archive likewise reveal her unshakable conviction that the Belgian inheritance rightfully belonged to herself and her family. Hers appears to have been a kind of obsessive certainty, a “holy madness,” almost a matter of religious faith. Nothing could shake this conviction\u2014not even the doubts expressed by her relatives,[26]<\/a> nor the repeated failures she experienced throughout the proceedings. Consequently, she interpreted every rejection as the result of a conspiracy. When, at the beginning of her research in 1912, she requested assistance from the Hungarian National Archives concerning the genealogy of the Esterh\u00e1zy and Horv\u00e1th families, and the Director of the Archives, Dezs\u0151 Cs\u00e1nki, politely declined her request\u2014informing her that “the compilation of the genealogy of the Counts Esterh\u00e1zy of Gal\u00e1nta, or the exhaustive communication of all material concerning that family preserved in the National Archives, falls outside the scope of the institution’s duties”[27]<\/a>\u2014Franciska interpreted the refusal as a deliberate attempt by influential circles to obstruct her efforts. She later reported with evident satisfaction that proceedings had eventually been initiated against Cs\u00e1nki himself.[28]<\/a><\/p>\n

Even after the case had passed through the Belgian\u2013Hungarian Arbitral Tribunal, and after she had received official decisions from every competent authority stating that she possessed no legal claim, Franciska refused to abandon the cause. Drafts of petitions addressed to the British royal household have survived among the papers in her archive. During the 1950s and 1960s, by then elderly and in poor health, she no longer sought the inheritance itself so much as financial assistance from her “English relatives.” In this respect she achieved a measure of success, receiving several payments of 500 forints through the British Embassy in Budapest.[29]<\/a> Following her death, her daughter made one final attempt in 1965 to revive the inheritance claim,[30]<\/a> but the banana box archive preserves no evidence of the outcome.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the Belgian inheritance affair cast one final shadow many years later: in 2005, in a settlement on the shores of Lake Balaton, a female fraudster obtained loans from her victims by claiming that she would soon receive the Belgian royal inheritance.[31]<\/a><\/p>\n

The Formation of a New Archive<\/h4>\n

Anyone examining the documents can hardly escape the impression that the Belgian Royal Inheritance Case was the organising principle behind the formation of Franciska P\u00e9terffy’s collection and that it determined which documents she considered worthy of preservation. This applies not only to the records relating to the struggle for the inheritance itself, the extracts from parish and civil registers and various certificates collected in support of the claim, or her genealogical notes, but also to the correspondence and the older documents preserved in the archive. An excellent example is provided by the papers of the P\u00e9terffy family of Cs\u00f6gle in Veszpr\u00e9m County. In August 1931, only a few days after the Friss \u00dajs\u00e1g<\/em> article reporting on the Belgian inheritance and Franciska P\u00e9terffy’s efforts had appeared, K\u00e1roly P\u00e9terffy contacted her with the intention of joining the proceedings as a claimant and of examining his relative’s old documents. In his letter he described the history of his family as follows: “Accordingly, I respectfully inform you that the P\u00e9terffy family of Zala County, and we ourselves, originally came from the so-called Vadas\u00fcl\u00e9si Butsfa in Vas County and settled in the village of Cs\u00f6gle in Veszpr\u00e9m County during the sixteenth century in the following manner. Mikl\u00f3s P\u00e9terffy had two sons, Istv\u00e1n P\u00e9terffy and G\u00e1sp\u00e1r P\u00e9terffy. Istv\u00e1n settled at Cs\u00f6gle, while G\u00e1sp\u00e1r moved to Zala County\u2026 I preserve in my archive the deed of partition executed between these two brothers. I also possess the renewed grant of arms issued by King Leopold I, together with several old documents relating to Katalin Horv\u00e1th, daughter of J\u00e1nos Horv\u00e1th, formerly Vice-Lieutenant of Vas County. In short, my documents sufficiently demonstrate that I too should participate in the inheritance in question.”[32]<\/a> Since the deed of partition relating to Vadas\u00fcl\u00e9s\u2014a deserted settlement in Vas County near Boba\u2014dated 1596 and represented the earliest document in Franciska P\u00e9terffy’s archive, it is evident that the charters relating to Vadas\u00fcl\u00e9s (1596), Boba (1614), Cs\u00f6gle (1699, 1723), and Nagyal\u00e1sony (1821), the last of which also mentions Katalin Horv\u00e1th, daughter of J\u00e1nos Horv\u00e1th,[33]<\/a> had been lent to Franciska by K\u00e1roly P\u00e9terffy for use in connection with the Belgian case. Consequently, these documents never originally formed part of the P\u00e9terffy family archive at Nemesgul\u00e1cs, even though they referred to members of the P\u00e9terffy family. There is likewise good reason to suppose that the documents relating to the various Horv\u00e1th families and the Raposa family also reached her through her fellow claimants, although they ultimately remained in her possession.<\/p>\n

We do not know when or under what circumstances the E\u0151ry and Dobosy papers came into Franciska’s hands. In contrast to the documents discussed above, she may well have inherited these from her father’s estate.[34]<\/a> A considerable number of documents originated from the archive of the lawyer Istv\u00e1n E\u0151ry (1805\u20131878) of Gyulakeszi, a prosperous nobleman of Zala County who owned estates in Gyulakeszi, Diszel, the estates of Dobos and B\u00e1cs, and also at Gul\u00e1cs, where he spent his later years. His wife, Roz\u00e1lia P\u00e9terffy (1815\u20131869), was a cousin of Franciska’s grandfather. Owing to this family connection, Franciska may either have inherited the papers or obtained them on loan; what is certain is that she made use of them in the course of her research. According to one of her handwritten notes, the property disputes of Istv\u00e1n E\u0151ry, his family, and the Dobosy family concerning lands at Diszel were of particular interest because of the litigation over common landholding and land consolidation involving the Esterh\u00e1zy family: “At that time [in 1861, concerning Diszel] our own father did not appear, and therefore they received no summons. Prince P\u00e1l Esterh\u00e1zy appeared, however, together with the legal representative of the Abbey of Zalaap\u00e1ti, Prince Egon Philipp von F\u00fcrstenberg, another count, the Dobosy family, Istv\u00e1n E\u0151ry, and Countess Zichy\u2026 This is very important: the Belgian king shared the estate together with the Dobosy branch; he received 1,875 holds in Zala County, and Prince Egon Philipp of Belgium likewise received 1,875 [sic] holds. He himself was present at the hearing, and the written record survives. I can produce it, together with many other Latin deeds concerning landed property.”[35]<\/a> Despite the many factual errors contained in this note, it clearly
demonstrates that Franciska evaluated every document in her possession from the perspective of the Belgian inheritance case and frequently interpreted them in accordance with what she wished to prove. She was an enthusiastic and indefatigable researcher, yet she lacked the training necessary for the proper interpretation of early modern legal and archival documents.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, it was precisely because of her extraordinary efforts, and because of the search for the Belgian inheritance that occupied so much of her life, that numerous sixteenth- to nineteenth-century sources relating to the noble society and local history of the Balaton Highlands survived the upheavals of the twentieth century. Her estate demonstrates that an archive may often come into being in the course of a major lawsuit or other significant undertaking, bringing together documents relating to different families and originating from widely separated places.<\/p>\n

Tibor Neumann<\/p>\n