02/28/2024
This is a shot in the dark but I am stumped. I got a question about why Magyar Street has that name. I've checked every single source I can think of and found nothing. The street already had that name when the village plat map was created in 1852. I thought perhaps an early inhabitant had that family name but I've combed through the census and other records and can only find one single person with that name in the entire history of the town. (It was Steven Joseph Magyar, born in Lorain in 1925, died in Wellington in 1995, interred in Pittsfield Cemetery.) Someone suggested that the word Magyar is another term for people of Hungarian descent and while that is certainly true, I am not aware of anyone in Wellington's first decades of Hungarian heritage. They mostly came from the Berkshires of Massachusetts and had English and/or Dutch backgrounds. By the 1870/80s there were loads of residents in town that were born outside the U.S.--something like 15% of the population--but again, I know of Canadian, Bavarian (German), Irish and even Chinese residents but no Hungarians. By any chance, has anyone ever heard a family story about how Magyar got its name?
