Zajzon-s and Zayzon-s

 According to József Pálmay, the Zajzon-s belong to the same ancient family, whatever the spelling of their name is:

“This old Székely family has retained its old spellings to this day, even though the Zajzon family mentioned above write their names with “j”, adapting to the new spelling. However, in old documents the names of the Zajzon families (both from Uzon and from Illyefalva) have been written in different forms as well, i.e.: Zayson, Zejzon, Zayzon, Zaizon és Zajzon. Hence, the circumstance that one writes his name with “j”, while the other with “y”, does not rule out the common ancestors originally thought of by me.”

This is credible because even within my family two siblings (my mother and her brother) were recorded in the official records with two different spellings: my mother wrote her name ZAJZON, while her brother ZAYZON. From now on, I am going to use ZAYZON in each case, including those who spell ZAJZON their names. 

That’s how we got to the story of this website. When I was a child, I learnt that we might be of noble origin. This did not cause any particular emotion to me, I was neither afraid what the communist system would think of it, nor did punch my heart the fact that I might be “privileged”. It was just interesting.

One time, a member of my family showed me a photo which was a photocopy of a noble diploma of Zayzon family. It was believed that this diploma was my mother family’s noble diploma and it was kept in secret by my mother’s brother.

He was a simple craftsman, he wasn’t much afraid, so he dared to wear his name in a more pathetic ZAYZON writing style.

My parents have already lived a few difficult years, my father was constantly being watched, so we didn’t really want to know about this story, we were simple ZAJZON-s.

Today, neither my parents, nor their brothers live. The noble diploma was not found, although I was looking for it thoroughfully in the late 80’s. Then, during my visits to different libraries I got resources about ZAYZON-s and slowly I started collecting systematically the data and building my family tree.

2001 was a turning point, when I put together all the collected data into a book for my mother’s 80’s birthday. I took photos of different family trees, searched the internet, but the link with the “noble” Zayzon-s did not came through. It was somehow when a tunnel is drilled from the two ends and do not meet in the middle. I tried to add data to the published Zayzon family trees and also to find documents in my family library.

I already had a lot of data, but the tunnel still didn’t want to get together. In 2009 I joined the Genealogical Society of Transylvania, where from I got a lot of help.

I was invaded by a huge number of records, primarily church records from Uzon, Illyefalva, Sepsiszentgyörgy and other villages. The breakthrough occurred and the missing link was found in the Calvinist church registers of Marosvásárhely. It turned out that the noble Zayzon of Uzon had nothing to do with us and a copy of the noble diploma could surely come to us by mistake. Similarly, we do not have any relative relationship with the noble Zayzon of Illyefalva.

My ancestors did not fight with the Turks, or if they did, they didn’t do it worthy of a noble.

Now I’m here, having a lot of Zayzon data on my computer, so I thought I’d love to assist those who are Zayzon descendants and are interested in their family history. I’ll do this without even thinking of any compensation. Zayzons of the World, feel free to turn to me, ask, and if you have additional information, documents, old photos, we could contribute together to expand the big Zayzon tree.

Any feed-back is more than welcome.

Dr. János Demeter

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