In a similar vein, one of my great-grandmothers was born in the Hungary half of Austria-Hungary, not too far east of Vienna. Her family was ethnically German. According to some cursory research I’ve done, the church records of the area are all written in Hungarian. She immigrated to Wisconsin around 1880 with a large contigent of folks from the same area. Once in Wisconsin, they were collectively called “Bohemians” by the locals, even though Bohemia was another part of Austria-Hungary entirely. When they redrew the borders after WWI, her town ended up in the condensed Austria by a matter of miles (and people with her last name are still living there today).
Oh, I know. But if I’d written to the archives in Vienna trying to find family documents, it wouldn’t have done me any good - that was my point.
When I mentioned this to my grandmother, she suddenly recalled that her mother spoke Yiddish and Polish, but not German. One finds genealogical clues in all sorts of places.