Obviously I never met him, but he was unknown by my family.. He immigrated from Almas to Chicago, USA in 1912. His son was my great grandfather, who was born there too but died young in 1943, my grandfather let my dad up for adoption, and I’ve only recently been the first one in my family to find more info about that side of our family.
I’ve found the basics like the Wikipedia page (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma%C8%99) but it looks like it was switched back and forth between a few different countries over the last 100 years? There’s just barely any information on the internet about it in English and it’s hard to find more.
He called his home country Yugoslavia or Austria on a lot of his legal papers.
Is there any additional books, documentaries, or info out there you’d recommend? Any additional info at all would be interesting. Just curious about the world he was coming from.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Transylvania
The Romanian version has a bit more data but lacks historical ones: https://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comuna_Alma%C8%99,_Arad
When he emigrated it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then became part of the short-lived [First Hungarian Republic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Hungarian_Republic) before becoming part of Romania. You can see it evolve on these [historical maps](https://maps.arcanum.com/en/map/europe-19century-secondsurvey/?bbox=2467885.7687506257%2C5823401.836991683%2C2482399.2494962737%2C5828695.101200432&map-list=1&layers=158%2C164) with its name varying between Almaș and Háromalmás. It seems like a small low-density village as [the commune apparently has a little over 3000 inhabitants](https://comuna-almas.ro/2015/10/13/prezentare-generala/). You can use google translate to read [some monographs about the commune](https://bibliotecaarad.ro/monografii-comuna-almas/).
his name sounded romanian, hungarian, jewish or maybe slavic (serbian)? Banat is a mixture of this people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banat
>Just curious about the world he was coming from.
We are not an alien planet, you may come and visit us.
Also, what’s the American obsession with ancestry? I will never understand you. There are many people in Romania with ancestry in Russia, Greece or even Syria, but we don’t give two flying fucks about it.