| djon: Re: the last Heiduska? | Ferdinand Heiduska came to the US as a Hungarian...about 20 years later he was granted back-dated citizenship. I've never heard of this procedure anywhere else. Perhaps some error had been made.
The Federal Judge in San Francisco granted the citizenship as if he had happened twenty years earlier, explaining that on the document (which I have). The judge noted that my Ferdinand Heiduska had come to the US as a "subject of the King of Hungary."
I believe he spoke a minority German dialect but his son had no noticable accent. I don't know if he spoke other languages, but I suspect he spoke a little French, like everybody does, because he made a point of traveling there once.
His handwriting has no cyrillic hints (I do read Russian). I think his first wife, Maria spoke German. His daughter, my mother Lilian, speculated lightly that he might have been Jewish as she was mystified by his background...but there seems no evidence of any religion, though as a jeweler he did travel to Antwerp to buy diamonds on one occasion (he was also visiting Hungary)... and his son, Ferdinand Jr, was a Mason and avowed athiest...I don't know if Ferdinand Sr was also a Mason. |
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