Mária Ványi

Memory

Below is a rough translation of a Hungarian newspaper article:

Mária Ványi died in the age of ninety. She was delivering newspaper for long decades all around the year. The years and the papers became burden on her shoulders, but if she was invited and chatted on somewhere, she had a special sparkle in her eyes and she started to talk:

-- My life is very hard... Although once my ancestor saved the city from a debt...

Everybody was smiling on her story, until she was heard by Gyula Kaszap, a teacher from the capital, who was at home visiting his mother, and who likes to be engaged with researching old nobilities.

Gyula Kaszap did a background check on the story of old Mária Ványi and in the nobility archives he came upon interesting data. He determined from old documents, that a person called István Ványi received a nobility title in 1690 in Nagykőrös and got married to Anna Kiss Gergely. He had a small vineyard, where he had 7-8 barrel of wine and from the price of the wine and from the 60 thaler he received with her wife he started to trade swine and then cattle and he became a rich man. Meanwhile under redemption and taxes the city got in a difficult situation, in which István Ványi helped with 400 thaler, which was a large sum that time.

In later documents it appears that the debt was payed off by the city to István Ványi's daughter part in cash, part in meat from the slaughterhouse of the city; a part of it was let off by Mihályné Széll due to good memories.

István Ványi's lineage ended, but around 1800 some Ványis from the parallel lineage appeared and acquired the nobility letter from Mihály Nyári then vogt (mayor) for one Kremnica ducat guarding fee; the county, however, learned that they are not from the direct lineage and it ended up in a big nobility trial that was lost by the Ványis. The old newspaper lady was the descendant of these Vanyis, who were suing for their nobility.

Gyula Kaszap made steps, based on these, to get some pension for Mária Ványi succumbing under the burden of life, whose predecessor was that István Ványi, who with his loan two hundred-something years ago saved the city from God knows what kind of difficult situation; however the old lady did not wait for the pension, last week she passed away quietly...

—Kis Újság, 1928. február 14.