Are you of Slovak (or other eastern european ancestry)? You might be able to help your distant relatives!

[freedomlives]

Living in rural Slovakia, I am most familiar with the situation we have here regarding land and inheritance. I just helped a friend in the village get in contact with his distant relatives. Although he is a historian, his pressing motivation is to get a hold of land that was basically "lost" to the family, because the owner of the land immigrated to America, during the period of communism here, where a lot of land was farmed by the state, issues of inheritance weren't dealt with promptly, and then contact with people was lost, so a lot of times the land is in the name of someone who immigrated and has already died and lost contact, and effectively is in control of the state. In my friend's case, he had put together his family tree, and had a list of names of descendants of the relative who had died, and I was able to make contact and get him in touch, and now he's getting signatures from two elderly (one is 96yo, with a farm in Texas, and even still remembers how to speak Slovak), with which he'll be able to go to whichever government offices and inherit the land.

So if anyone on here has ancestry from present day Slovakia (your ancestors, however, might have been speaking Hungarian if they were from the southern part of present day Slovakia, or Rusynian if from the east), you may be able to help some distant cousin who lives in the countryside increase the amount of land they can use. And I'm happy to help, however I can, because the situation with land, state control of a lot of it, and (lack of) small farming in this country is very sad (I've spent a good bit of the last decade with my wife sorting out her family's lands, at least all of them (but one) stayed here, so no international issues to sort out).