Mary Hensovsky
Mary Hensovsky was born Mária Henczovszky at Rákócz on 24 April 1887. Rákócz was a village of Zemplén county, in the northern part of the Kingdom of Hungary. It is Rakovec nad Ondavou today, in the Michalovce district of eastern Slovakia. Henczovszky is the Hungarian spelling of the name and Hencovsky the Slovak one. In America the family wrote it by ear, as Hensovsky and Hensoyski.
She was baptised the next day in the Greek Catholic church of Rákócz. That church used the Eastern rite and was in union with Rome. The priest entered her as Mária, female, legitimate, the daughter of Mihály Hencovszky and Mária Vasily, both Greek Catholic. Her godparents were János Szojka, Greek Catholic, and Mária Harman, of the Reformed church. Two years later the same pair stood for her brother András.
Her 1940 death certificate gives her birth as 19 May 1887. Her husband supplied that date. The nineteenth of May was the birthday of her brother András, born in 1889, and the date on the certificate was probably his. The baptism was written at the time.
She grew up between Rákócz and Berettő, now Bracovce, a few miles apart. Her father was a zsellér, a cottar with a cottage and no farmland of his own. Her mother died at Berettő on 18 May 1892, of wasting, aged forty. Mary was five. Her brother András had died as a baby, and her older brother Mihály died in March 1894, aged ten. By then her father had married again, and a half-sister, another Mária, was baptised at Rákócz in February 1894.
Her own passenger list names a different village. In February 1910 she gave Petrocz as her last home and as her birthplace, and the clerk wrote it three times across the two pages. Her father, she said, was Hancovszky Mihaly, and he lived there. Petrocz is neither Rákócz nor Berettő. It was most likely her husband's village, where a married woman made her home, but no record yet shows it.
Her memorial gives her marriage to John Kovacs as 17 October 1906, in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, probably at Jerome. Her passenger list does not agree with it. Asked whether she had ever been in the United States before, she answered no. If that is true, she was not married in Pennsylvania in 1906. The list was made at the time, from her own answers. The church book of her village or the marriage docket of Somerset County would show which record is right.
Their first son, John Jr., was born in Slovakia on 17 September 1908. John went ahead to America. By February 1910 he was at Jerome, a coal town in Somerset County, collecting his mail at Box 24. Mary followed with the baby. She sailed from Fiume, the Hungarian kingdom's port on the Adriatic, on the Cunard liner Caronia on 31 January 1910, and landed at New York on 15 February. She was twenty-two. She could not read or write, and she had paid her own passage. The clerk entered her son Janos as two years old, though he was a year and five months. This was the crossing the family remembered, the mother sailing for America with a baby.
Seven children are known. After John Jr. came Michael in February 1911 and Anna in January 1913, born in Pennsylvania. The family then moved to Aliquippa in Beaver County, the steel town on the Ohio River below Pittsburgh. Malveene was born there in April 1915 and Elizabeth, called Betty, in November 1919. Andrew came after Malveene. By 1923 the family was in Cleveland, where John was naturalized that September. Margaret, the youngest, was born about 1927 or 1928.
In 1940 they lived at 19416 Kinsman Road. Mary died there on the evening of 12 April 1940, at about twenty to six. She was fifty-two. The doctor's hand reads coronary thrombosis, a clot in the arteries of the heart. Her daughter later wrote that she "died suddenly" when Margaret was twelve, and the certificate bears that out. John answered the clerk's questions. He knew her father's name and not her mother's.
The funeral left Saint Michael's Russian Orthodox Church on Union Avenue on the morning of Monday 15 April. She was buried that day at Saint Theodosius Orthodox Cemetery in Brooklyn, Ohio. Her obituary gives her maiden name as Henczovsky and lists her children with their married names: John Jr., Mike, Anna Saluppo, Malveene Vargo, Andy, Elizabeth Zabor and Margaret.
John was buried beside her twenty-three years later. Their stone carries a three-bar Orthodox cross, and set into it above her name is a porcelain photograph of her. The stone gives her birth as 1890, three years after the certificate's date.
She was baptised in the Greek Catholic church and buried an Orthodox. Many families from the Zemplén villages joined the Orthodox church in Cleveland in the 1920s and 1930s, and hers was probably one of them.
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Cite: Heirology, "Mary Hensovsky (1887-1940)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/mary-hensovsky-1887-1940-996569.